WV Mountainhome

Gone gone Gone away

2010-06-08T21:14:00.003-04:00

If you are interested in anything else from me - head to simplyinfinity.blogspot.com and see it all there. Nothing more will here be posted. no more comments accepted or responses made. That's All Folks!

Changes coming up in the near future.

2010-01-16T10:38:00.001-05:00

I'm going away. I've pretty much stopped adding to things here anyway, so in the very near future, I'm going to take down everything that's here. Articles, posts, photos, all of it's going away. I'm moving on to new things and I'm going to be putting all my time and energy into them. I also don't feel like leaving all this around as I'm having to deal with an increasing number of comment requests from spammers. So in the interests of keeping my time constraints down, all my blogs and the like are coming down. All my flickr photos are coming down, etc. I'll eventually pop back up somewhere, and if I'm so inclined will make a note of it somewhere, but as it is, no one is coming here and no one is commenting except for spammers on anything around here, so not much point in keeping it up.

Thanks folks, it's been a fun ride for a long time, but life and a new direction has taken me to a point that certain things are less important in the grand scheme of things.

This site and all the associated comments, photos, info will be gone by the end of February 2010.

walking

2009-11-23T08:36:00.001-05:00

Getting ready to start my walk today. I've been doing this for a while now and consistently up to 3 miles+ every couple of days. I've fallen off of my daily walk, but I hope to get back to that after this week. It's getting to the colder parts of the year, and I have to change what I'm wearing, but I'm still going to keep doing this. It's helping my attitudes, and giving me a little time alone to think about things. It also gives me some time to actually get back into listening to podcasts again. Time for me to go. I was supposed to leave about 20 minutes ago, but got involved online. Story of my life.

Cleaning up.

2009-11-21T18:42:00.001-05:00

Today was spent with me cleaning up the office and the family room. Lots of stuff got dumped. Printouts, 3.5" floppy labels, 3.5" floppies, etc. I've got a stack of burned cds that I need to go through and find out if they have anything important on them. I actually feel like I got something accomplished today. That felt real good. My office is much more organized and I can find things a bit easier. I'm horrible at putting stuff back where it belongs immediately. That's just has to change. With everything else I'm trying to do, being dis-organized is not something I can afford to be.

An exercise in annoyance

2009-11-21T10:07:00.001-05:00

So today was as I say above, an exercise in annoyance. Since we got the new laptop (a couple of months ago), I secured our new wireless router and all was fine. Until we decided to make a trip. I've been trying to get a handle on all my email accounts (over 10) and decided to forward it all to one gmail account. This way I'm no longer using a dated plain text POP service to get my mail. If we decide to check our mail while traveling I'd like it to be through an SSL encrypted server. So today was setting up all my accounts, and Tammy's as well to forward to one gmail account for each of us. It's all done now, but dealing with the older ISP webmail systems has been a pain today. I've had to get and change passwords for each of us a couple of times to take into account the new security they've put up in it. I had to redo passords that didn't fit their idea of security and make sure I had all the information down. This also involved finding my Account Pin number from my cable bill. All in all a lot of fun :) .

Haven't been around for a while

2009-11-02T07:37:00.001-05:00

I've been debating whether or not to start this thing up again. I've been pretty locked into Facebook and a bunch of other stuff, but I miss this place. A lot has been happening around me and things aren't exactly the rosiest at the moment. I have a decently positive attitude about it, but I'm truly unsure of how much to share here. What I will share is the stuff I've been doing lately and that may get technical or geeky or anything else. I'll be putting some photos up and sharing what it's like to be doing a lot of walking for someone who hasn't done it for a long time. I'm up to a little over 3 miles 3-5 times a week and I'm going to try to get back to my 6-7 times a week as it will make me feel better I think.

I've enjoyed this blog, but a lot has been holding me back from writing lately and I think that's a bad thing. The decision to start up again will help me I think and maybe give me another outlet that I can use.

Things might change around here. I'm not sure if all the current content will stay or what else. I may even move to wordpress.com even though I'm more able to change things here. Who knows.

So, without making any promises about frequency, I'll say that tentatively, I'm back for a while.

Culture of Fear

2009-07-21T13:19:00.004-04:00

Do you ever just sit back and wonder, "Where'n'hell am I?" ? More and more I read the news and think, this isn't where I grew up. This isn't right. This isn't the American Dream I learned about in school.

Quick takes:

A town in California wants to record the license plates of every car that VISITS the town.

The MTA wants to install audio recording devices to listen in to employees and riders(customers).

US Customs agents and DHS want to know what's on the laptops, phones, media cards, or any portable electronic device that US Citizens are carrying across the border. They will even image your drive if they want to and the Supreme Court has done nothing.

People's ability to live in their homes and not have the land seized for private development has disappeared (Kelo decision). I understand the need for Eminent Domain, but the application of taking land and giving it to private developers to increase the tax base of the local govt is appalling and quite against the Constitution. No matter what 9 justices in DC say.

These are just little bits of it. Photographers are being hasseled at every turn for taking pictures from public land. Cops and govts are overstepping their legal authority to grab power and persecute those they want to. Not from any particular bias I can see, but from simple greed and power madness. People are getting tased for not signing tickets fast enough to suit the patrolman.

What the hell is wrong that no one is standing up and screaming from the highest points around that this is NOT the America that we want or will tolerate? Is there anyone else in this country that is so sick of the politics and left/right crap that we can't just get back to the non-career office holders that tolerate the job until their time runs out? They SERVE the people that elected them. They are NOT corrupted by the system. Is this still possible in a country that sees one bad president after another, whose only goals seem to be making things "Fair" for all.Which in truth means making it unfair for us all.

The ideals with which this country was found, that we are all created equal - I don't give a damn if you're Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Agnostic, Athiestic, Bhuddist, Gay, Straight, Bi - whatever the hell ever you are. You and I are equal, the same, entitled to the same protections under the law with no provisions for special treatment because of being in a 'disadvantaged group'. We all get this promise - Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

You get your life. You get your Liberty. You get the chance to pursue your dreams of happiness. You get the right to fail. You get the right to fall flat on your face and end up in the cold. No other place in the world gives your those extremes. The ability to soar, and the ability to crash. That's up to you. That's up to YOU making an effort. When I've made the effort and I've done all I can do for myself and my family, don't you, who's laid back on your ass all this time come to me and say, "You're happy, I'm not as happy, so I think you should give me some of yours. That seems FAIR"

Because I'm going to tell you to go to hell. I've scraped, fought, lucked out and managed to rise above my own previous mistakes. They've made me who I am and while I don't want to relive them, I wouldn't change anything today. So I think it's time for all of us to go back and really read the Declaration of Independence and The US Constitution. Read them closely and then look around you at the country we are living in today. Decide for yourself if they have anything in common at all.

The media (left/right) and the corporate/political power structures run the country. They do their best to rule us by instilling fear of the other into us. Fear for our children is the prime motivator they use. Fear of us having to sacrifice our standard of living, or in the ultimate, fear of losing it all becuase we didn't allow THEM to do what was NEEDED at the time.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton - 1887.

Those words are as true today as they were then. Look around at your leaders and take off the rose colored glasses you are wearing. Has Obama reversed any of the power grabs that Bush made? Not a single one. All powers that Bush took for the Executive branch have remained in the Executive branch. All it takes is a simple reversal of all the changes Bush made to restore the powers to where they belong. Because in the end, that powers comes from us and if we stay mired in this culture of fear that Bush, Clinton, Obama and all the media outlets have pushed us into, we're going to lose it big time. We will fall from the lead democracy in the world to the level of the two bit dictators we used to rail against.

This has been a lot more rambling than I wanted it to be, but it's off the cuff and it's me. I'm tired of footing the bill for people who won't take it upon themselves to rise up and do something, anything to try to make their lives better. I'm tired of being told I can't do this or do that anymore because someone's afraid of what it could lead to. "Terrorists take photos, all photographers are terrorists...". I'm tired of nanny state laws that tell me I can't do this or that. I like not having to breathe smoke in restaurants, but you know something... I also have the ability to not GO to a restaurant that allows it. If a few smokers mean more to a business than a room full of non-smoking families, I guess I'll not go there.

So in the end, I guess what I'm trying to say is, this, today is not the America I grew up in. It's not the America I want and I'm going to do what I can, be it voting in every election, going to council meetings if I can, or spewing this out online for someone else to read and maybe get a cluebat upside the head. This country must change. It must stop thinking that everything must be fair and equal. Some people, due to ability, luck or position, will rise to the top. Others due to lack of same ability, will fall. That is life folks. Wishing it to not be so will not change it. Forcing it to be so is criminal. It sucks the spirit, and hope and freedom from us all. It's time to stop doing that.

Places I'm spending my time right now

2009-06-19T08:42:00.001-04:00

Inkscape - Vector graphics drawing program

http://screencasters.heathenx.org/
http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/

The GIMP - Graphics program - ala photoshop, but free (beer + speech)

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/
http://meetthegimp.org/

I'm also taking these video casts and making dvds of them for my portable dvd player that we just go. I might take one or two of them with me when we go on vacation.

What's going on?

2009-06-07T10:29:00.001-04:00

It's been a long time since I posted anything around here. That's been due to a lot of things, but I guess mostly Facebook (also Mafia Wars. I know...). Also I've recently gotten back into D&D again. Mostly through listening to ActualPlay podcasts of games. I really like the way 4th Ed is going. I know a lot of people will scream ata that, but I was never into 3rd or 3.5. My last time was with the 2nd ed rules and they were absolutely too cumbersome for anything more than paperwork.

So, what's happening now... I'm spending time on Facebook, listening to podcasts and trying to figure out what's going to happen with my job. The facility I'm working in will be closed in Oct and I'm waiting to find out where and what I'll be re-assigned to. I'm not going to be doing any more speculation here or in public, so don't look for it. But since it is public knowledge that it's closing, I figured hey why not let people know why I'm not being vocal about it.

Today I figured out why my VMs were not working well. I've removed VMWare and am using VirtualBox, and it has different types of networking hardware. I just need to reconfigure the guest OS to use the new hardware instead ant it seems it will work right. I'm currently installing Ubuntu 9.04 into a vm from the minimal istall iso. I like the idea. I always got the Debian network install cd and used it, so now at least Ubuntu has one as well.

Enough for today. We're going out to lunch for Tammy's Bday today and I'll be working 3 days this week as I took her actual Bday off and then decided to shoot for a long weekend as well, so I'm having a 4day weekend after m-w this week.

Folks, I don't know if or when I'm going to be posting again, but don't worry, it will happen sometime.

A little old, but what the hell, it's the subject I'm thinking of right now.

2009-03-08T17:10:00.001-04:00

Saw this nugget on FARK today. Thought it would be a good read for some people. It apparently went around back in December 08. So it's a little older. Read it all the way through. I'm pretty much of the same opinion. Let the market correct itself. It's going to be painful either way, so let's get it done and over with without all the extra debt.

For donutbuzz...

2009-03-05T11:05:00.001-05:00

Just saw this, figured I'd post it before Donutbuzz... So Manchin can have his expensive inauguration, get his $55,000 pay increase, but a $13,000 dinner is canceled because of the economy? Wow, way to go there Joe, always get the best bang for your buck! Did you think maybe it would be a good idea to return your salary increase to the state's coffer's as well as the gross adjustments to the administrative salaries that happened while classified staff get nothing? Yeah, I'm just as pissy as Donutbuzz is about our "illustrious leader".

Linux stuff - KDE 4.1, Ibex, Kubuntu

2009-03-05T08:18:00.001-05:00

I decided while trying to mess with VirtualBox last night, that I would instead of the Gnome version of 8.10 I'd put on Kubuntu. From just the eye candy alone, KDE 4.1 is worth it. Now granted I'm only in the initial stages of testing it and virtual performance is no indication of an actual install on the HD, but I just might when I finally upgrade to 8.10 (about the time that 9.04 (Jaunty J) comes out), put this on instead of the generic Ubuntu version. I'm going to have to get more in depth with it and it's going to take some time, so expect to see some updates to my experience with KDE.

Supposedly KDE 4.2 is out and will be even better than 4.1, so that's another thing to look into.

Watch what your idiots in Congress are doing!

2009-03-04T10:27:00.002-05:00

I'm not so normally active in politics as I've become lately, but the environment we live in and the sheer stupidity that has followed from the previous administration to the current one makes me more than frustrated. So I'm going to start making these little informative posts and urging more people to get involved, and know what is going on.

Today's little gem comes from multiple sources, but it's something I heard about last time it came up. So here's the deal... You pay taxes for government funded research. These tax dollars go to researchers, universities, private corporations etc... When they publish this information, access to it currently has to become available for free after 12 months. What this means is that after a year other researchers can take this study and build upon it making things better for everyone. Increasing our scientific knowledge and helping create the "better world" that we all believe in. (Ok that's a little tongue in cheek, but you get my drift right?)

So currently there is a bill in the House that restricts this requirement on any research that is funded in part by any other means. So if, in addition to the grant money from the US Government (Your tax dollars as the government has no other money of it's own!), it is funded from any other source then it no longer has to be free to access the research after 12 months. It can be held hostage by the large publishing companies and you (the ones who helped fund this research) will not be able to get access to it.

This is wrong on so many levels it's ridiculous. The money grubbing politicos who sponsored this madness are John Conyers - Robert Wexler - Steve Cohen - Darrell Issa and Trent Franks. Three Dems and 2 Reps. MI, FL, TN, CA, and AZ, respectively, although I don't believe this stupidity grants them any respect at all.

Open access to scientific research is what will make this world a better place. being able to see where you have already been is good, building upon those shoulders is even better. Scientists all over the world, Nobel Laureates among them, have stated that this will be a horrible blow to science. Maybe they should be listened to. Stop letting the big publishing companies who give Congress money (hello!? Undue Influence anyone?) make the rules. Government funded research is research for the people of this country. It is paid for by us, published by us and we damn well deserve free access to research we paid for. Call your Congress critters today and tell them to kill this bill! Email them and give them what for over letting big money interests write their legislation. Do you realize that very little of the legislation passed is ever truly written by the people or aides of the people who pass it? It's written by corporations and special interest groups who have gotten and maintained sway over the government by the excessive amounts of money they throw at them - in all branches, no matter what they say.

It's time for all of us to throw off our apathetic attitudes and take back the government from the special interests, corporations and money that has pervaded it. You are the government, if only you decided to be it.

Chili Recipe...

2009-02-28T14:54:00.003-05:00

Ok, I'm not known for my ability to actually write down a recipe for things I'm cooking. I usually just wing it and try different things out. This is certainly true of my Chili. It's never made the same way twice, and while some general rules are followed I'm always looking to tweak it and use something different to get that taste just slightly closer to what I want. I'll never be able to match my mom's chili, but I have now tended to move more towards a spicier, afterburn kind of taste for my own.

Erin has been buggin' us all week for chili, so I had Tammy get the last few things I wanted for it and it's currently simmering on low for about another 2 hours (currently 1 1/2 so far, I figure 3 - 3 1/2hrs will be good). She'll get it for dinner tonight. So I've been thinking that it might be a good idea to write this stuff down so if I do happen to get that one just right I'll know what I did to try to recreate it. So with out much else to say about it - here's my Double Chili Recipe 2-28-09.

2 Pounds of ground beef
1 whole medium sized yellow sweet onion (diced)
1 cup diced bell peppers
2 tsp dark chili powder
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp garlic powder
1 small chipolte pepper in adobo sauce
worcestershire sauce to your own taste (this can be left out, just a thing I like)

Brown off the ground beef with all above ingredients in skillet. Drain grease and other liquid from skillet and put beef in a large (6qt or greater pot). I have a small skillet, so I did this in 2 parts - (I halved the amounts and did it twice).
Now for the beans (my recipe, my choice, so you "chili doesn't have beans" folks can go away! You can also do all this while the beef is browning off. Add the following to the pot:

2 cans petite diced tomatos
3 8oz cans of tomato sauce
4 cans Bush's Chili Beans - medium
1 can Bush's Chili Starter - mild
2 tsp crushed red pepper
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dark chili powder
3 large Chipolte peppers in adobo sauce.

Now be sparing with the adobo sauce, don't drop a lot in, but don't be timid either. Again - I'm not much for exact measurements. Stir all of this up in the pot and bring up the heat until you start getting the bubbles through all of it, then turn it down on your lowest setting and let it simmer for 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hrs. This is all about how it fits your taste, if your not a spicy person, then cut back on the chipolte or crushed red pepper. I usually let the chipolte peppers stay in the pot until the last hour or so.

As with all things like this, it really won't be right until it's had a change to meld overnight in the fridge, and get reheated. I do recommend reheating in a smaller pot (this makes a lot of chili, so pick the amount you want to eat and reheat that)

So there's my first Chili recipe that I've actually written down. This is all experimental, I'll have to get back to this post to say what I thought of it all, so maybe wait until I do that, unless your someone looking for anything new. We're going to be experimenting with a lot of new recipes in the near future and some might work and some won't. This will be one of them (hopefully one that works!).

Video, ffmpeg, iAudio, and i7Remux

2009-01-21T09:39:00.002-05:00

So I was listening to The Bad Apples Podcast (it's 3x17 if you want to listen to it. Don't pay attention to the titles, look at the filename on the episode link) and since I've been trying to come up with a way to make screencasts for myself and for some possible uses in the future, it was interesting. It did however cause me to uninstall ffmpeg and then recompile it with x264 and x11grab enabled. I already had x264, but I had the newest SVN version of ffmpeg and had to recompile x264 since I'm running Hardy instead of Ibex. There's a warning about it in the ubuntu forums. That also lead to compiling yasm so that x264 would be faster.

So this led to an hour or so making things right so that I at least understood what the hell I was doing in compiling it. I'm still unsure, but at least it's all working properly. I also found another site that gave me instructions to get a better quality screencast from the get go instead of the poor quality ones I was making.

Now on to another reason I was messing around with these things. I had not been able to get videos that I converted with ffmpeg to work well on my iAudio7 player from COWON. I ended up at an iAudio forum and got very good instructions on how to fix my noise problems. I could always have redone this in windows, but you know... I've been booting almost exclusively to linux for a while now and not even booting into windows unless my wife needs it up and I only use it to surf and check email. To get anything done I end up rebooting back into Linux. Amazing how that's changed in the last 2 months. Used to be the other way around. Eventually I'll get her exclusively on linux as well. Then bye bye windows for good I think.

Anyway, back on topic... so this guy made this program called i7remux that fixes the avi files so they run better under the iAudio7. The link to the forum topic is i7remux -- video converter for COWON iAUDIO 7 - iAudiophile.net Forums and it works pretty good. I take one file run it through ffmpeg like he says and then run it through i7remux and it comes out working on my player unlike the straight ffmpeg conversion. I'm personally not entirely sure why, but video encoding is not my strong suit...yet.

So to all the folks I've linked -- THANK YOU! You've made it easier to let me work with this stuff and this is why I use linux. The community makes it all better.

While everyone gets all teary-eyed...

2009-01-20T11:57:00.005-05:00

Ok. Not to downplay the importance of today, or it's historical significance, I'd like to remind the world (especially us Americans) about the only truth in politicians.

Sorry, but I'm a cynic.

(I did say I'd never embed a youtube video, but oh well. For those of you who are broadband impaired - see the lyrics below the video.)

Won't Get Fooled Again - The Who

We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again

The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they were all flown in the last war

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
No, no!

I'll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half alive
I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky
Though I know that the hypnotized never lie
Do ya?

Yeah!

There's nothing in the streets
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

I didn't vote For Obama. I don't believe many things will change in the assemblage of more power to the executive branch. I also don't think that we'll see much difference in anything other than less money in our hands. That was happening anyway. My point is this... Don't think for one minute that beyond some superficial changes in position that anything is truly going to change. I hope I'm wrong and can come back to this in a couple of years and say I was, but I don' think it's too likely to happen.

A day spent wrangling with podcasts/catchers

2009-01-19T17:55:00.001-05:00

I have to say, I'm disappointed. I've spent practically all day messing with podcatchers for Linux and I'm back to what I know is the best of the bunch. That's not to say that it's the one I wanted to stay with. I really do like Bashpodder and it is the one I've decided to use from now on. However the sorry state of graphical catchers is my prime reason for giving up and falling back on it. It is simple and to the point. It's also not threaded and only opens one connection at a time, so therefore it's a little slow for me (19 minutes to just check my 32 podcasts, that doesn't include download times). I've been using Mediamonkey in windows for a while now and it is the best of the windows podcatchers. It is also so easy to sync with my UMS device that it's practically laughable.

If I could think of a way to contribute meaningfully to a project that was close to what I wanted it to do I would. I can't program worth a damn, but wow, Songbird? Are you kidding me that in this day and age you don't support podcasts? It's not even on your roadmap! Amarok is workable, but I don't care for it - haven't tried 2 yet. Icepodder is also workable, but again it doesn't do what I want it to, plus it's also slow, but threaded so it can open more connections. So that's in it's favor. Let's see, what else... Banshee - not my cup of tea either. Although I thought it would work the first time I tried it, after using it, I'm still not convinced.

So while Bashpodder to me seems a little slow, it does what I want. Where I want it to, and the only thing I have to do now is decide I'll not try and get that last episode right before work, but will have to only pull down my podcasts at night. BTW I'm using Chess Griffin's modified Bashpodder. I like the update all and directory features.

Oh, and here's an open note to JC Hutchins - I like the stories, but your feed is killing me. I keep getting all sorts of youtube and flash crap that is trying to download. Is there some feed that only has the podcasts in it instead of all the extra stuff? It took me a while to make sure it was your feed, but it is. I'll have to actually go there and find out if there are more feeds.

I'm Back...

2009-01-18T15:54:00.001-05:00

OK, that may or may not be what you want to hear. Depends on if anybody actually reads this thing. I've been out for almost a week due to a really nasty virus or something that I got. The symptoms started Monday night (Jan 12) and pretty much stayed on into the weekend. I won't bore you with the details, but guess what? I lost almost 9 pounds! <sarcasm on>Yay!<sarcasm off>

Anyway, today is my first day sitting in front of the computer again and I thought I'd make a post. I'm trying to expand my BASH scripting skills and while I'm sure there is a plugin for Deluge that does this seamlessly now I decided to create a simple script to pull the ip blocklists from peerguardian, unzip them, and then merge them all into one big text file. So without further ado, and I'm sure this could be cleaned up a bit. Here's my first attempt from LAST Sunday. Since it worked from the get go I've not done anything to polish it up.

#!/bin/bash
# by wvmountainhome 1/11/09
#
# Shell program to get peerguardian IP blocklists and merge
# them into one list to import into the Deluge Bittorrent Client
# This requires you to have 'curl' and 'p7zip' installed in your distro.

# delete current lists
rm megalist.txt
rm level1
rm spyware
rm edu
rm ads-trackers-and-bad-pr0n

# use curl to get files
curl http://phoenixlabs.org/lists/ads-trackers-and-bad-pr0n.7z --remote-name
curl http://phoenixlabs.org/lists/edu.7z --remote-name
curl http://phoenixlabs.org/lists/level1.7z --remote-name
curl http://phoenixlabs.org/lists/spyware.7z --remote-name

#use p7zip to decompress files
p7zip -d level1.7z
p7zip -d spyware.7z
p7zip -d edu.7z
p7zip -d ads-trackers-and-bad-pr0n.7z

#concatenate the files together
cat level1 spyware edu ads-trackers-and-bad-pr0n > megalist.txt

#done

A New Year and time for a re-boot

2008-12-31T09:29:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow begins 2009 and I'm going to have to do some things around here to freshen the place up. So look for changes in the near future in relation to design and the like and hopefully I'll get some time to concentrate on my tech stuff more. I have a lot of ideas to get down and work with and I'd like to start doing a lot more in the informational posting area on the tech blog.

I've managed to get some DVD authoring done under Linux and I really like the app I'm using to do it. SO maybe sometime soon I'll get it all down and people can see what I've been doing.

Have a happy and safe New Years's.

Now I can do in Windows what I'm doing in Linux...

2008-12-26T16:41:00.001-05:00

Today I found on of the "Gold" items I've been looking for. You see I'm a command line junkie. I enjoy doing things at the command line, it just seems quicker fro a lot of the mundane tasks I'm working on, for instance creating directories a whole bunch of times. I finally found a nautilus-plugin to open a Terminal in the directory I'm looking at, and have long wanted the same for windows. I've even gone so far as to look for other File-manager replacements for windows. I was trying some out today, when it hit me to do a different search and in 3 words I found a blog that had the info I needed to do it. You have to create a new context menu entry, but it's all laid out exactly how to do it and it works wonderfully.

All this new stuff I'm messing with is making me think I need to restart my tach blog. It's looking a little unused.

A Morning in Pictures.

2008-12-19T11:14:00.012-05:00

My morning was interesting and fun. Today Erin and I made a prefab Gingerbread house and while it was something I had been dreading (possible screaming, tears etc. and that would have been me...), it turned out to be a wonderful time. I iced the house and she put all the decorations on. Well almost all. I had some influence in placement but most of it after the icing was all Erin.

She did all the people/trees/snowman.

She also had fun placing the small beads on the house as well as the large gumdrops on the roof.

Her other problem turned out to be the attraction to the icing. Tam and I both think it's not that good. I mean really, icing that has been in a box for who knows how many months. Yuck, but she licked it off her fingers every chance she got to do it.

We still haven't managed to really get her to stop the fake smiles when she gets her picture taken, but for me today that was not as important as a picture of my girl with the house she decorated.

Of course she had to be the one to take a picture of the completed house. So while I think my photo was better, (Then again I'm in my late 30s) I'm using hers. Because this was her morning.

Getting pretty damn tired of Facebook connect crap

2008-12-16T01:13:00.001-05:00

You know, once in a while I get really pissed about something and I spout off. Tonight's rant is about Facebook. More specifically Facebook Connect. I don't really care what anyone else thinks about this topic cause this is my rant you see? So I don't log into Facebook very often. I think it's a time sink and also it's annoying. I'm only on there because of a couple of friends and I don't going to accept requests for apps or anything. So I'm not sure about this facebook connect thing anyway. All I know is that when I go to sites to read an article or something I shouldn't have to get this message from NoScript about facebook trying to do some damn request that it thinks is a XSS attempt (Cross site scripting - bad thing!).

So Facebook - here's an Effing clue - I don't want you to know what the hell I'm doing online or where I'm going. And also to Lifehacker - quite frankly you can kiss my ass. I'll never read your site outside of an RSS reader again. I don't like people trying to get me - connected - to everything in the social media world. It's my choice not yours so - piss off. All this is is trying to do more marketing, more ads and I'm tired of it. I'm almost ready to pull the plug on all the "social" sites I use because of crap like this.

Now back to your normal inconsequential posts.

Skill loss

2008-12-16T00:12:00.001-05:00

You know when you haven't done something for a long time you tend to have to reacquaint yourself with the skill? Today at work I noticed that when I moved my head one side of my headphones would cutout. This wouldn't be a problem, but since I'm trying to be a little frugal, and - while I like the earbuds I really shouldn't wear them - I wanted to just fix the over the ears ones I was using. I figured after a little messing with them that it probably was a simple pull from the contact. I tend to treat these ones pretty bad - throwing them in my backpack, pulling on the wires when not thinking about it, etc.

That's all it needed, but I'm really going to have to re-learn how to solder properly. It would also help if I did it at a table with all the overhead lights on instead of trying to do it on the top of my CPU or tool case and using a little halogen desk lamp for light. It was late and I knew I wouldn't be able to do it in the morning as the munchkin would want to be around the tools. That would be a recipe for frustration. So in all it took me about 45 minutes to finally strip and re-connect the wires to the contacts (too many cold solder connections). My headphones now work, I'm reminding myself to start tinkering again, and I'm going to have to really begin thinking about a workspace sometime next year for things like this.

Winter

2008-12-07T22:54:00.000-05:00

So in the end, while it was cold and not exactly how I'd planned my morning, and while I may not have been that interested in going out into the cold myself, I went. And this is why. Anything for my munchkin.

Catching up and more

2008-11-30T21:16:00.001-05:00

So Ive been quite the sick person the past week. We all have, but I ended up staying out from work since Tuesday of last week. Only had Thursday off for the holiday, but they said I was contagious so I didn't go in. Due to that fact I've not been online and have only recently caught up on email/surfing/etc... I've been playing a lot of Soduku and just spending time laying about hoping not to cough up a lung or anything. Thankfully it seems Erin got a pass on this even if Tammy didn't.

We're both doing a lot better and while I'm still coughing it's manageable now. Hope everyone had a good turkey day and all your travels were safe and not too much trouble.

Dropbox

2008-11-08T01:19:00.001-05:00

I started playing with Dropbox today and it looks really neat. It's an awesome way to sync a folder online and be able to put data on multiple PCs. Check it out - it runs on linux/mac/windows and is very cool.

The 10 Cannots

2008-11-06T21:26:00.001-05:00

I've been listening to some stuff lately and the ideas keep flowing out. Here's another set of quotes that I'd like you to read, ponder and really think about. No additional comments from me, but just read it...

The 10 Cannots

By William J. H. Boetcker
(wrongfully attributed to Abraham Lincoln)

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.

You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.

You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.

You cannot establish security on borrowed money.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they will not do for themselves.

Looking for an album.

2008-10-29T01:40:00.002-04:00

I've tried to find this for years at a relatively normal price, but amazon wants $54+ for it and I'm not paying that. So if anyone has any help or knows of a good second hand CD store around in WV that might have this album by Tim Curry, I'd love to know. I used to have the cassette, but it disappeared from my hands sometime in the mid 90's.

So here's the cover: just for a shock or blast from the past as it may be.

Something I heard today got me thinking...

2008-10-28T01:26:00.002-04:00

As you may know, I listen to the Dave Ramsey Show. I manage to hear the 1-hour-long podcasts that are made available from the website daily and sometimes I end up stacking them if I've been busy or need to listen to other stuff at work. I'm not going to get into a discussion on the show or what anyone thinks of it or him, I listen to it, my life my time, if for some reason that bugs you or you think it's not your bag, so what?

Anyway, I heard last Friday's (OCT 24th) podcast and something he read got me thinking. It falls in line with some other things I've been thinking about and I wanted to reprint it here to let it percolate in people's minds for a while. I'm not going to say anything about it right now. I've not looked into the writer's history, but I will and do some thinking about it. What I want you to do is READ it. That's all. Just read it and in your own mind, think about it. Ponder it. Really sit back and listen to the words and ideas coming forth from this brief set of lines. I've always thought brevity was a thing to shoot for and this thing has it. so without anything more here it is.

An American's Creed - By Dean Alfange
Reprinted in The Reader’s Digest, October 1952 | Dean Alfange

I Do Not Choose to Be a Common Man. It is my right to be uncommon—if I can.

I seek opportunity—not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me.

I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed.

I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia.

I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat.

It is my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid; to think and act for myself, enjoy the benefit of my creations and to face the world boldly and say, “This I have done.”.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

*Originally published in This Week Magazine. Later reprinted in The Reader’s Digest, October 1952, p. 10, and January 1954, p. 122, lacking these words: “I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat” and “to stand erect, proud and unafraid.”

* The Honorable Dean Alfange was an American statesman born December 2, 1899, in Constantinople (now Istanbul). He was raised in upstate New York.

He served in the U.S. Army during World War 1 and attended Hamilton College, graduating in the class of 19?22. He attended Colombia University where he received his law degree and opened a practice in Manhattan. In 1942 Alfange was the American Labor Party candidate for governor of New York and a founder of the Liberal Party of New York.

Dean Alfange was also Professor Emeritus at UMass Amherst and a leading figure in various pro-Zionist organizations (between other actions, in November 1943, he appeared before the House of Representatives and addressed them on the rescue of the Jewish people of Europe). He died in Manhattan at the age of 91 on October 27, 1989.

I fall back to an old favorite

2008-10-21T01:38:00.001-04:00

So I enjoy using Linux. Primarily right now because in Windows, my audio sucks. It has some weird sluggishness to it and it makes listening to anything in it horrible. I do however love the one windows podcatcher/media organizer I use which is MediaMonkey. I've yet to come up with one in Linux I like. Amarok is okay, but it's not exactly what I was hoping for, maybe when version 2 comes out.

So in trying to find the ultimate Linux podcatcher, I've returned to an old favorite of mine - Bashpodder. For just pure simplicity and sheer ease of use it can't be beat. Sure it's a command line nightmare of things to get right the first time and I hate having to configure it, but once that's done, just let it go baby!

I'm using Chess Griffin's modifications to BashPodder and might see if I understand all the logic in it to make it more of what I want. My only complaint about Bashpodder was always that it just always needed that one last tweak to get it perfect for me. I could never let it alone after I started monkeying with it.

The thing I think I really need to check on is to see if I can get Amarok to scan my downloaded files and add them to a podcast section of my library so as to be able to sync them to my device (Cowon iAudio 7). It will be interesting to see if I can get it done like I want it to be done.

Second Hand CD sales - Record company stupidity yet again

2008-10-17T10:34:00.001-04:00

As a person with little or no love for any record label I am so glad things like this happen. It's a write up about a lawsuit filed by UMG (Universal Music Group) against a reseller of promo CDs. This guy would scour second-hand shops and purchase (LEGALLY!) cds and then sell them online. I've always been a fan of second-hand music shops and have lamented the extinction of them in my local area.

The write up is something you should go read if you have any interest in just how blatantly absurd the music industry has gotten. It would appear that UMG has gotten a huge pile of FAIL in it's face from the US District Court in Central California. They decided that promo CDs are gifts and as such can be disposed of by the recipient as they wish, no strings attached. Hooray for a court that gets things done right! The "First-Sale Doctrine" is a cornerstone of the way things are done in this country. You own what you buy. The ability to dispose of it in your own way is your right as well.

Illnesses

2008-10-17T02:00:00.001-04:00

As I type this, my baby is trying to get back to sleep. Both of them are. Erin was sick tonight. Second episode of throwing up in two weeks. We had hoped to have this behind us, but it seems she might have been re-exposed at school. She'll be staying home tomorrow (today) and I've finished putting all the sheets/bedspread etc in the washer after giving them a good going over with SHOUT. She insisted on having Tammy sleep in her room with her tonight, so I'll be in the bed for the first time in quite awhile by myself. She tried to get Erin to come into our bed and I'd sleep on the couch, but Erin insisted she was "too young to sleep in that bed".

I hope we all get over this virus soon. The whole house is on anti-biotics. night folks.

More on my work in Linux.

2008-10-01T01:40:00.001-04:00

So the deal here is that I've been trying to get moved over to Linux as a full time OS. In the progress of this I have to do everything in Linux that I currently do in Windows. Mostly these days that pretty much only involves surfing, email and audio work. I've not done much with video for a while and don't know when I'll get to it. So I want to give some of my impressions.

First, I've got the latest Ubuntu release - Hardy Heron 8.04.1 and this has got to be the best I've seen so far. Everything just pretty much works from the get go. No major problems for me and anything I've needed to find out a simple google search has found the info for me.

I'm using the same apps I use in windows for almost everything. The exception being my music organizer. That's a thing I need to work on as I had been using MediaMonkey and so far neither Amarok or Banshee seems to be able to handle the huge amounts of music, audiobooks etc that I want to pump into it. I'm also using MM as my podcatcher and so far the attempts to use a linux app for this is not yet there for me. I know I need to get used to the different way of doing things, but it will take a bit.

Now on to what I really wanted to say. It's FAST. Even with the 3d effects cranked up to the max, this is a kick ass speed demon of a system for me compared to my windows partition. Firefox especially is MUCH faster. I know this is a subjective thing for most people , but it's amazing to me how quickly pages load and it checks the rss feed I have compared to the windows version of Firefox.

It was also a great to see how quickly it converted 11 songs I recorded into Audacity to mp3s (I know - I should use ogg but I have my reasons here.). In windows - LAME takes a long time to do the encoding, but using the same version encoder in Linux dropped it down to about 30 seconds per song instead of 1-1.5 minutes. That a huge difference. Plus, in windows I would get skips in the encoded file unless I let it do the encoding and nothing else. In Linux I was spinning the cube (3d desktop effects), surfing and reading mail while downloading updates in a terminal session on a different desktop. That would cause my machine to freak in windows. I have 1GB of Ram and this MOBO is 5+ years old, along with most of the rest of the pc except for a component her or there as they've failed.

So let's just say I'm extremely pleased to be many steps closer to using Linux full-time. I see that day coming in the next few months. No more Windows for me. Why does that make me happy? I'll be safer, have a more up to date and cheaper to operate system and since we've been using free software like OpenOffice.org and Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. It's not like it will be a lot different.

I encourage everyone to get a Live-cd of Linux to boot and try. Understand a Live cd will be slower than an installed system, but it will let you see what you can do.

Audacity in Linux

2008-09-30T01:58:00.001-04:00

Had a time tonight getting Audacity set up in Ubuntu. I guess in the end it turned out to be my problem not Ubuntu's or Audacity. I was so used to the way Windows does all the mixing. I didn't get intuitively that the settings for recording and playback were truly that separate in Linux. I also found out that to hear Audacity play back the file I've just recorded, I had to un-mute the PCM slider. It's been a time, but I finally can do the cassette tape digitization under Linux. It seems to go better. For some reason my windows sound system is really messing up lately - sluggish and makes playback and recording of files iffy at best. Not a problem under Ubuntu now that I've got it figured out.

Let's try this again.. Unknown 80's song - Please help!

2008-09-29T01:02:00.000-04:00

For a long time I've been working through getting my old cassettes digitized so I can listen to all that old 80s music on my mp3 player. I've got a lot more to go and I'm managing to trim down what I actually need to convert, but I've again run up on a song that has confounded not only me, but the best of my friends (former DJs among them) in our attempt to figure out song title and artist for this thing. Googling the lyrics is no help whatsoever. We've tried the intros, the chorus, different variations of it and no luck so far. So once again I'm throwing this out to the net in an attempt to find out just who this is and what it's actual title is. I have faith that this will happen eventually.

As background info... I taped a lot of stuff off the radio and this was no exception. I've got a bunch of tapes labeled "Top 40 #" SO it most likely came from either a countdown or from just the radio around a countdown day when I was taping.
It's on my "Top 40 #5" tape sandwiched between "Back in Time" by Huey Lewis and the News and "Head Over Heels" from Tears for Fears. Also on the tape would be things like

Something About You - Level 42
It's a Sin - Pet Shop Boys
Power of Love - Huey Lewis & The News
In My Dreams - REO Speedwagon

So you're getting the idea that this is 85,86 or 87 timeframe. I've converted this thing to an mp3, its about 3.6 megabytes and you can find it (right click link to save it on your system, otherwise it might start playing in your browser.) at my charter page http://webpages.charter.net/michaelcazad/Unknown_80s_song.mp3 . Hopefully someone can help -

Lyrics start out like this

"Looks like your average Saturday night
Slow cruises under boulevard lights. -- not entirely sure about this line
I watched the break-dancers gather a crowd
the 10 o'clock show was just getting out.

This girl walks up beside me
wild eyes....(blah blah blah - can't tell)
ask her "what's your name?"
and she tells me and says..

Rock (or walk - unsure) this way if you want me
the way that I want you.
Rock (or walk) this way, follow the leader
Oh, that's all you gotta do

And more in that same vein. So here's my pitch folks. All you 80s music geeks or friends of one, help me figure out just who the heck this is? Please! I tried this back in 2003 and got limited response. Nothing helpful yet.

Linux, Mediamonkey and WINE

2008-09-25T02:22:00.001-04:00

Well, well, well. This place is certainly interesting. Maybe there's hope for MM yet to run under linux. I'd love to see that.

More Thunderbird stuff.

2008-09-25T02:00:00.001-04:00

Well, with tonight's release of the Lightning extension, I had to go back and repackage it yet again for my dual-boot / single-message store solution that is working out so well. Now that I've got the method down and can reproduce it easily enough, I'm thinking about automating the process with a bash script. There's the fun stuff. Geeking out by banging out a quick and dirty script to do something you want. I love this stuff!

I'll post it up here if/when it works right. My only thoughts so far are needing to replace text in one file and unpacking and moving files into proper directories that will have to be created. Interesting problem. I'll also see if I can find a place to upload my repackaged extension so others won't have to go through this tedious process. I really have to give it to the site I pulled the process from. It works flawlessly.

Sound problems in Thunderbird - Linux - new mail sound

2008-09-14T11:09:00.001-04:00

I've been trying out new mail sounds in Thunderbird and running into the most annoying static problem. The *.wav files play perfectly in any media application, but just come across as static in Thunderbird. I googled around and found a thread at the Ubuntu Forums that's a little old, but still has some info in it. The latest post was from July 2008, so it was recent. That's the one I got the most info from. It would appear that Thunderbird is kind of picky about the sampling rates for wav files and I'm going to try to fix that, but it's been real hard to find a sampling-rate conversion program that is user friendly so far. I'm going to end up trying Audacity and maybe Aqualung to see if the will work.

Audacity worked. I changed the file from

RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, MPEG Layer 3, mono 22050 Hz

RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 22050 Hz

and now I've got Ralph Lee Emrey telling me "You've got mail, Maggot!" everytime I get new mail. Maybe not the sound that will stick, but now I know what to do any time that the sound file won't play. Make sure the file headers are good and convert the audio to make the thing work better.

Never tried Aqualung to see what it does, but will mess with it later.

Pre-k, Headstart, Nanny State and lies.

2008-09-13T01:40:00.001-04:00

Harsh title. My child has been enrolled in Kanawha county schools in their Pre-k program and goes to the local Elementary school. We've had no problems with it so far (only been in actual class for 8 of the 10 days so far - sick for 2 of the 10), but I am annoyed to say the least at what I'm beginning to percieve as a coercive attempt to push my child into the HeadStart program.

Let me get some things out of the way. Head Start is a really good thing. It is a great program for the people that need it and I support it in general. There are income limits to this program that we definitely don't meet. I'm not trying to sound superior, but I make a decent living and we're doing fine. We wouldn't qualify for Head Start in any working of the scenarios, and that's quite alright with me.

The Pre-K program for Kanahwa County is not HeadStart only and there are all sorts of children from different backgrounds in my child's class. I think that's great. Here however is where things are bugging me.

At the orientation for the Pre-K class we talked to the social worker and asked her that since we didn't qualify for the "Free-Reduced Lunch" program, were we required to fill it out. "No". The two days later I got the form again when I brought my child to school. I again told the teacher this time that since we didn't qualify there was no requirement that I fill the form out or so I was told. My reasoning behind this is simple. I do not give out my tax information or go into detail about how much I make if there is not a significant reason to do so. The form was asking for a lot of information which it should and which I was not comfortable giving since we weren't asking to be considered for the "Free-Reduced" program. We pack a lunch everyday and that's the end of it to me. At least we know exactly what she's getting for lunch.

Anyway, that seemed to take care of itself and I didn't pay it anymore attention. I explain that because I look at that as a symptom of what followed in the last 2 days.

I called home from work and found out the social worker had called, talking about putting my child in the Headstart program. The gist I got from talking to my wife was that there were not enough HeadStart kids in the class and they wanted our child to be moved into the program. We don't qualify for the program. Oh, an income waiver can be issued. We just need a copy of your 2007 1040 form. And then a few items about a home visit (with the teachers, part of pre-k, nothing out of the ordinary from the paperwork) and the worker was told that my wife wanted to talk to me.

So when I found out about this, my initial reaction was, we don't qualify, what's going on here? The next one was no, my tax info is between me, the IRS and my tax preparer (me). Later I called home again and my wife went over her notes from the call. She said that she got the impression that this was being asked not mandated and that it was the 1040 (we initially thought it was my w-2 they wanted). So again my reaction was, no we don't qualify and I'm not opening up that kind of information to people who have aboslutely no need for it, as well as not placing my family under the hoop-jumping restrictions of the Head Start program if it's not absolutely necessary. We decided that I would call the social worker this morning.

I was in the shower when she called today and now she's annoyed my wife to no end. First, she was asked if she'd talked to me and she explained our situation. We make way more money that the maximum for HS and we don't feel we need to be in the program, plus we're uncomfortable giving them access to our tax info. Here comes the responses..."Well he'll have to give that info when she goes to college or when he gets an auto loan." "We keep the upper income information in a separate folder and only open it up if the feds come looking in an audit." "I didn't mean to cause dissension between you two."

Okay. While the blood boils a little let's take these separately. I don't have to give that info when my child goes to college - unless we want NEED BASED financial aid. This is 13 years in the future. I will hopefully be set up enough that we won't need any financial aid for my child's college, and then it's being given for a reason that will benefit my child. Next - who the hell has to give tax info out to get an auto loan? I've bought 3 cars without doing it in my life so far. A credit check and employment verification, but never tax forms. Then about how the info is kept. In a separate folder from the rest of the headstart files. Hmmm. That seems like some kind of ploy to get more funding and hope you don't get audited. Oh we were told we'd get an income waiver since we made too much to qualify as well. That seemed a little fishy to me.

Now don't get me wrong. As I've already stated, HeadStart is a good program in my mind. I support it but I'm not interested in being in it for any reason. What gnaws at me is that it is apparent that this is a bid to maintain or increase funding without there being a real need for it. They should be ecstatic that fewer children at my child's school need the program. Isn't that the damn point? I don't get this whole "Government is the provider of all" mentality. If we don't need a program why the hell are we being shoved at it? My only idea is for the money.

Last we come to the most irritating comment of all. Dissension. Have you got the idea somehow that my wife and I don't agree on this? Sorry we're in complete agreement. We don't want your program, don't need it, don't even come close to qualifying for it and will never submit ourselves to the policies or regulations of it. Why the hell should we submit to home visits and classes that are invasions of a perfectly good life as we have at the moment. It's of no benefit to us.

So now I'm just itching to give this woman a piece of my mind. I'll wait until an opportunity arises though. I'm not going looking for a fight, but I will make it abundantly clear to her that I'm more than pissed with the ideas she seems to have.

Ranting done for now. I think this could have been presented better, but I hope you all get the gist.

Hulu.com

2008-09-09T09:00:00.001-04:00

I didn't think it would work. I really didn't. It would appear that the idea of giving the finger to You-tube and pulling the content off of Itunes has worked. I'm watching shows on Hulu.com. Actually sitting down at my computer and watching shows.

Now for the bad part. I got into this late and the shows I want to watch are now "expiring". I managed to catch the pilot episode of "Terminator: the Sarah Conner Chronicles" (say that 5 times fast!) and it expired about 2 hours after I finished watching it. The second ep expires tonight and I'm not sure I'll be staying up to watch it. So here was my solution. Netflix - add the first season to the queue. I'll get to watch it on my TV and in a comfortable chair instead of this one that is perfect for short sessions, but horrible for more than about 30 minutes.

So I think the idea is that Hulu gets you into a show, but if you really want to watch it, try Netflix.

BTW: I thought the pilot for SCC was pretty good. drew you in but seemed to have a few holes in the plot. Maybe I need to brush up on my Terminator timelines. I never saw the last movie and probably won't catch the new on in production until long after it comes out on DVD. So from the first 2 I'm thinking there are a few discrepancies. Oh well. It's just a movie/TV show.

Thunderbird now setup in Ubuntu for single data store

2008-09-05T07:10:00.002-04:00

After working with it for a bit and finding an answer to a question about the Lightning extension, I've managed to miraculously get my email client to work completely in both Linux and Windows with the same data store.

I say miraculously, because when I tried it yesterday it wasn't working. I could get my email in both OSes, but the calendar functionality was not there. It was almost there, but it was not possible for it to load my calendars in Linux. I'm not sure what has happened since yesterday except that I've rebooted and updated the linux side with some system updates. I tend to think it was the reboot that did it. I think just the process allowed it to see the extension properly again.

What I ended up doing, and I found this through a google search and the ubuntu forums, along with another place I can't remember, is this:

downloaded the windows lightning extension.
downloaded the linux lightning extension.
renamed them from *.xpi to *.zip
unpacked them into the same directory
created a platform/WINNT_x86-msvc/components directory
created a platform/Linux_x86-gcc3/components directory
moved the *.dll files into the windows one
moved the *.so files into the linux one
zipped the whole thing back up and then renamed it *.xpi again.
then installed the extension under linux.

This was where it went wierd. It would bring up a calendar but not one with any data in it. So I was going to resign myself to it not working for a while until I figured it out. Then it just seemed to work this morning after doing some updates and rebooting the linux side. So I think I just needed to logout of Gnome and reboot the whole thing to get it properly loaded. It works just fine now. I now have a Dual-boot system the has Thunderbird and Firefox working from a single profile instead of having to sync all my data to a separate spot.

[update] forgot one of the most important steps. You have to open up the install.rdf file (as a text file) and change a line or two. Find where it says em:TargetPlatform and change it to read <em>WINNT_x86-msvc</em> and <em>Linux_x86-gcc3</em> .

I found this at the mozillazine forums and a link off to another site that had this info.

twitter spam

2008-09-04T10:09:00.001-04:00

wow. Had to block a bunch of people on twitter today. went from 31 to 19 followers. All except 2 had already been suspended by twitter for their activity. Never once got a notice about them following me. So the 2 I did get a notice about, were commercial interests with a bunch of non tweets that were only links out to tinyurls.

I'm not a person that most people would follow and I won't allow commercially based twitterers to follow me and use me as a number in their games.

Ubuntu setup and community thoughts

2008-09-03T09:11:00.001-04:00

I've been updating and setting up Ubuntu the way I like it and while reading my feeds came across linc's latest post on his upgrade/new install. I clipped out a few things that I thought I didn't need, but it was nice to grab a script that could automate a lot of the things I'd normally do. I especially liked the method of getting XMMS. I can't understand the reason it was pulled out of the ubuntu repositories. I still think it's the best, simple mp3 player out there for linux.

I'll take his idea and create one for my own system for other times I need to re-install and this way I won't have to spend all that time looking for specific packages in synaptic.

That's one thing that really makes me proud about the linux community. Look around and you'll find people who have done just about everything and documented it somewhere that will help you along in your own exploration and work.

Firefox using same profile under windows and linux

2008-09-02T13:02:00.001-04:00

Now this is something that I've needed to look into for a while when dual-booting. I've done the "create new profiles" thing and it's always a pain. This little page has helped me in many ways today. I've gotten Ubuntu 8.04 installed and booting properly now and this was my next hurdle before I got too many other things started with the system.

I only use firefox and thunderbird and this seemed like an easy way to get things working right. I am hopeful that I won't have to keep authenticating myself every time when I boot into linux as someone able to open the xp_boot drive to let firefox read and write to my XP profile, but that is another task for another day. Today by folloing the instructions at samanathon.com I've been able to pull up all my passwords, cookies, bookmarks etc.. inside of linux without a big deal of copying things around and have to do all this syncing garbage.

Folks, it's going to be a lot of tech topics in the near future and you'll just have to get used to it again.

Archives, etc... and starting to install Ubuntu again.

2008-09-01T09:12:00.001-04:00

In the last few days I've been burning DVDs of archived programs, pdfs, etc... and clearing them off one of my 200GB drives. The main reason for this is that I need the space to install Ubuntu again as I want to spend more time working with it. I get this bug every once in a while and when I upgraded my system to XP, from W2K, I killed the Ubuntu partition and haven't re-installed it until now. I say now, even though I have some work to do to get to that partition.

[Warning Tech speak below]

So my setup currently is a 100GB boot drive that has 2 partitions for XP. One is the boot partition, the other is for data storage (about 20GB for that one). Then I have 2 200GB drives that come off of an ATA controller card instead of directly from the motherboard controller. This is causing problems again. Windows and my BIOS sees the 100GB as the boot drive. The Ubuntu Alternate install CD sees the one of the 200GB drives as the first drive in the list. Then again it is a little weird. The partitioning program for Ubuntu sees the 200 GB drives as SCSI drives (even though they are IDE) and sees the 100gb as it is supposed to. The order it sees them as shown to me was what got me confused again.

A normal install will see your HD's in this manner --

First HD on the first controller /dev(ice)/hda
Second HD on first controller /dev(ice)/hdb
First HD on second controller /dev(ice)/hdc
Second HD on second controller /dev(ice)/hdd

SCSI devices are named similarly /dev(ice)/sda, etc...

More IDE controllers mean continuing the alphabet soup on down the line. So what got me was when it told me the 200GB drives were SCSI drives, yet named them /dev/hde and /dev/hdg. This meant that it was naming them as IDE drives, in correct nomenclature as hde was first drive on first controller of the ATA card, and of course hdg is first HD on second controller of ATA card. Not a big deal I thought.

Turns out it is. After wating the long time for the install to complete (I say this as it normally only takes about 20 minutes to get a complete install done and this took 30+), I was told it was placing the boot manager (so I can boot into windows or linux) on the MBR (Master boot record) of the boot drive. I thought this would be /dev/hdc as that is the boot drive and that is where windows lives. It placed it on the MBR of the first 200GB instead. /dev/hde. Not the way to get me into the linux side at all. So now I think I'll have to drop the 100GB hd onto the first controller of the ATA card to get it to boot properly.

Sometimes it's a pain, but I am beginning to remember that I had to physically move my old boot drive to the controller card the last time I did this for the same reason.

Learning the ropes about how the pc sees the drives again is at once fascinating and irritating. I'll do the switch sometime in the near future and then re-install Ubuntu (8.04) again. I'll wipe the MBR of the 200GB drive and get things set up in the proper manner.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog

2008-08-09T00:46:00.001-04:00

I listen to a LOT of podcasts and a few of them have been just adamant about people going to see this webisode performance created by Joss Whedon. Now I'm normally not one to tell people to just go watch things online, but damn! This this is really good. I watched it at Hulu.com and it was my first time going there. The best thing I thought about the whole experience, besides the video was the ability to "turn down lights", which basically darkens the whole screen and makes it a much better viewing experience.

It's a bit much to describe it, so I think you should really just go to Hulu and watch all three acts. I liked doing it that way instead of as one episode, it made it better in my opinion, although that meant 3 ads to sit through instead of 1.

So here's the link to ACT I of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog, at Hulu.com

Selectable Output Control

2008-08-01T09:03:00.001-04:00

Now, the stuff I read over at BoingBoing alternately makes me cringe and weep at various times. They actually do a pretty good job at putting issues out in front of the readers and pointing you to other sites to get the full info. Today the idea is to send you to Public Knowledge to show you a simple explanation of what the MPAA has asked the FCC for. It's a thing called "Selectable Output Control". What it is for is to restrict your ability to watch VOD (Video on Demand) movies in the way you want to. What I mean by that is, you pay for a VOD and they want you to watch it on that TV and not placeshift it to a more convienent method of viewing. To do this they want to be able to turn off the outputs of your entertainment (ie cable box, DVR) system.

I have strong opinions about the MPAA and RIAA organizations themselves and also the apparent limitless power they seem to wield in Congress. I don't believe anything they ask for should be given to them and I certainly don't believe that they should have the right to tell me where and how I can watch a movie I've paid for. If you don't think this would apply to you since you might not placeshift movies for viewing (Slingbox, Ipod, handheld media device etc) then think about this idea. In order to protect the advertising dollars, how quickly do you think TV stations will pick up on this idea and try to get their own dispensation from the FCC to do it to certain highly rated TV shows or other programming?

The more power you give to someone the more they try to take. The money flowing into Congress from Hollywood and the **AA groups is unreal. Watch how hard certain Senators and Representatives push for these more restrictive laws and understand that your freedom to do things will ultimately begin to erode much faster as time goes on.

Take a stand now. Contact the FCC, your Congress Critters and your friends and inform them about how you feel about this idea. Start watching how much money goes into campaigns and from where.

Check out the explanation of SOC at Public Knowledge and even print it out if you want to give to people you know.

New Monitor

2008-07-29T11:11:00.001-04:00

Not the best time for this to happen, but the monitor I've had since 1997 has finally given up the ghost and decided to fry itself. Tammy turned it on to a crackle and awful electronic burning smell last night and immediately unplugged it. It got hauled off this morning. I ended up at OfficeMax since staples didn't have their advertised item in stock. OfficeMax did.

I am now the proud, yet poorer owner of an HP w1907 widescreen LCD monitor. Its going to take some getting used to. We both feel it is very bright and still not sure which resolution we'll keep it at. They recommend 1440x900 at 60Hz, which is where it is right now. I'm getting used to the wider screen real estate but it is going to take some time. The cool thing is I can recycle my audio speakers and give them to my dad for his pc since this thing has integrated speakers in the monitor. I'm using the DVI connector instead of the VGA one and I guess sometime I'll have to hook the VGA cable up to have ready for my tech support stuff for other folk's pcs. That will be cool since I could just switch inputs between cpus.

So, 211 bucks into a new monitor. I guess 11 years is good enough for the old one. I can only pray that this one will last half that long with the shoddy manufacturing I've seen in all electronics in the last few years.

Busy, busy, busy

2008-07-25T10:28:00.001-04:00

Trying to study for the ET test again, so not much going to be going on. It's less than 2 weeks away and I'm really intense on the studying. Sorry for the lack of updates.

TSA - or The Stupid Asshats?

2008-07-11T13:15:00.001-04:00

Since I don't fly , or haven't flown since almost 30 years ago when I was 5 or so, I rarely pay attention to what goes on in the airline industry. I do pay attention however to the stupidity that occurs involving various governmental agencies. I ran across a link today to a Salon.com story that just made me sit back and shake my head. It is also one people need to read all the way through and think hard about the last few paragraphs.

It's been linked to from a few places, but I'll just throw it up here as well. Ask the Pilot.

Time to start cleaning it up.

2008-07-10T02:34:00.001-04:00

Every single one of the following Senators should have their own private conversations, emails and web traffic publicly posted for all the world to see. They have no comprehension of basic privacy or the fact that you can't become the thing you're fighting against or it's meaningless.

The pervasive "security theater" attitudes in this country just disgust me. I believe in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I don't believe any of these senators do. No one who gives up their liberty for security deserves either. Those that continue to push forward this police state mentality - reminiscent of the "papers please" old Soviet era, where you are a criminal for anything you might do because it makes it just that much easier to keep you in line - should have all their own liberties taken from them.

I don't bitch about politics a lot around here because it incenses some, but this just royally pisses me off. I get more frustrated by people who renege on their word to fight these things and just crumble because they don't want to look weak on "security" issues. Yeah Obama, I'm talking about you. What galls me the most is seeing one of my own senators - Mr. Rockefeller - vote for this damn thing.

Oh sorry, I mean HR 6304 the FISA rewrite. That gives more and more powers to the government. Forgot to put in what I was bitching about. So yeah, I think the fact that Truecrypt came out with a new version on July 4th is very appropriate.

I think Wil Wheaton put it best in his post. It's just a single picture. So yeah, do what you can to roust these bastards out of office when it rolls around.

Clueless, pea brained idiots with no respect for the true America as it was intended that voted yea on the FISA bill, giving extreme powers to the government and giving immunity to telecom companies for wiretapping your conversations. Here's the list of those so voting YEA:

Alexander (R-TN)
Allard (R-CO)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Coleman (R-MN)
Collins (R-ME)
Conrad (D-ND)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Craig (R-ID)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Dole (R-NC)
Domenici (R-NM)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagel (R-NE)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Inouye (D-HI)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kohl (D-WI)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Lugar (R-IN)
Martinez (R-FL)
McCaskill (D-MO)
McConnell (R-KY)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Obama (D-IL)
Pryor (D-AR)
Roberts (R-KS)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Shelby (R-AL)
Smith (R-OR)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Stevens (R-AK)
Sununu (R-NH)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (R-VA)
Webb (D-VA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wicker (R-MS)

Walled Gardens

2008-06-28T09:32:00.001-04:00

As a rule I really don't care much for what anyone does with their blog or site or whatever. You are taking the time to put it out there and it should be up to you to do with as you please. The thing about being online is this...it's a community. Putting a blog up is in essence a self promotional thing, not that that's bad or anything, don't get me wrong. I certainly do this and I'm not too concerned about who reads it or what others think about it.

What I'm thinking about at the moment is related to a link I tried to follow from a blog I was reading. When I clicked the link I was taken to a page on Blogger that wanted me to login and said that this blog was for INVITED READERS ONLY. Now I certainly don't think it's wrong to create a private blog. What I'm getting at is the "walled garden" type of environment. I've never been an AOL subscriber or allowed myself to be locked into homepages, portals etc. They were the initial "walled gardens" having content only available to subscribers. It has been shown over and over again that you get way more from open walls and completely accessible readership than from private communities.

I understand there are reasons to work behind a private fence. I'm one of the biggest privacy freaks out there. Of course as you know I put a lot of myself out here online and, while I do have concerns, I'm willing to do this to an extent. I guess what I'm driving at is this...Links from blogs to items discussing your posts, should be looked at carefully. Exclusionary walls thrown up in front of a reader jar them and annoy them. I see no reason to link to a site that requires membership just to read an article, be it blog, newspaper (still annoyed with my local paper that removes stuff behind a wall after 7-14 days), or otherwise.

I'll surely get crap from this as I moderate all comments, but I'm not willing to open up to spam comments just to be the "ideal, open place". There's a difference in walling off content to being prudent with comments. And I'll point this out as well, yes I've posted this to my main blog and debt blog. There is a reason to that. You can figure it out for yourself.

Firefox 3 impressions.

2008-06-28T01:05:00.001-04:00

Well, it seems faster. I like a bunch of things in it and will get to those in a minute, but first lets go over the points that annoyed me after install. This may not be specific to Firefox, but to the extensions, but it's still an annoyance.

Sage - extension was updated for Firefox 3. Still had to manually point it to my feed list instead of it taking the information from the earlier version of the extension. So now I had to go through all my feeds and pull each one up because it thought every one of them had new items.

Coupon printers. Yeah I know, but Tammy likes them and we share the machine. Coupons.com has updated. SmartSource has NOT. Not a dig for Mozilla in anyway, but wow, that's going to be annoying until SmartSource gets it fixed.

This most visited thing in my toolbar. Obnoxious. I know where I go most so it's getting deleted.

I'll have more things as I go on with it in the next few weeks.

My likes pretty much are the speed it shows now. I hope they got the memory problem fixed. I leave it open all the time and always had to close it out and restart it with FF2. It just feels nicer. The big thing though is that 90% of my extensions (frak the add-on nomenclature) work or have been updated to work. That was NOT the case when FF 2 came out. So kudos to Mozilla and the developers for really being on the ball to get the extensions updated.

Vacation

2008-06-22T11:36:00.003-04:00

Are we ready? Clothes packed, almost. Video camera ready, charging. Batteries for digital camera, new ones in the package. Cash for trip- done. Directions for all the stuff we want to go to in Columbus, OH? Mostly.

We're off to the Zoo and to COSI. I'm bringing the video cam this time and hopefully will get the bug to post some up like Donutbuzz did. I'm glad we're not headed south, as I don't think I could stand a 2 hour traffic jam like they had on the return trip.

Be back real soon and maybe I'll even post a bit more this week as I'll be home most of it.

Flock, yet again

2008-06-09T02:07:00.001-04:00

I'm also trying out Flock yet again. It appears to have gotten better, but it's still freaking slow going from page to page. I'm now trying the blog editor of course, so we'll see how that goes. I think I'd need more screen real estate to really use this thing on a regular basis. As well as being accustomed to a much faster browser. I know it's slow because of all the stuff it does, but really, connecting to some of the pages I like to read takes almost minutes at time because of some problem or other in the browser. I know it's not my connection because I can open firefox and bam! I'm there.

I'll play around with it, but I'm thinking it will again sit around on the drive and not be used too much. We'll have to see.

Stuff.

2008-06-09T00:43:00.001-04:00

This post was made inside Scribefire. So if it looks weird or anything that's the problem. I tried it out before a long time ago and it added all these div tags and the like to my posts so I stopped using it. I decided to try it out tonight again just to see how it had been updated. It appears to have gotten some major improvements, so, well see how this goes.

Cabell Midland's 2008 Graduation ceremony. What a ludicrous, disrespectful show. I'm talking about the audience, not the students. I thought the beach balls and stuff was juvenile, but in the end it was their day. They had the opportunity to show that they had matured and a lot of them did a decent job of showing it, but a few in the graduating class still hadn't grown up yet. What was so much worse was the audience. Air horns and constant traffic up and down those rickety ass seats in the Civic Center (yeah I'm not calling it [insert lame ass store name here freaking arena] it's the Civic Center and always has been.) and leaving well before the entire class was finished getting their diplomas. If you're going to be that damn rude to these kids to not respect the achievement they've made in graduating from High School, then for God's sake why did you even come. 366 students in the class and it was going pretty fast and all these asshats were leaving and making noise like crazy. You think the students were lacking maturity? How the hell can you go to a graduation ceremony and not be respectful enough to sit through the whole thing? I hated mine over 18 years ago, because we had a "Business leader" as our speaker instead of the students, but I'll tell you this, barring a well deserved snub of the principal by the person who should have been Valedictorian instead of the principal's son, (she didn't shake his hand, got her diploma and left the stage), it was a respectful ceremony. Audience and students alike sat through it and while I'm sure it was as long for them as it was for us, the audience never displayed such open immaturity as the audience at Midland's 2008 Graduation. The asshats with the airhorns should have been ejected from the building. After the horns were strapped to their heads and set off.

Anyway. Got a little burr in saddle about that I guess. SO on to more stuff. The garden seems to be doing better even in all this horrible heat. The lettuce is getting bigger and close to being pulled out. The deer-chomped tomato plants have come back out and may bear fruit if they are left alone for the rest of the summer. I've lost 2 of 4 sunflowers and will probably lose one more, but I just need one that flowers to get next year's seeds.

Still have not gotten Erin's playhouse finished. We've been gone both days this weekend and it's really just to flaming hot and muggy out there to do it. Maybe this week.

Enough. Time to goof off before I go to bed. Night.

What's been going on...

2008-06-04T07:48:00.004-04:00

So, I've been kind of busy. Trying to put together Erin's all wooden playhouse (cedar shingles!) that my M-I-Law got her. Love the idea, but it's been a pain to assemble. Lots of pieces, I have to drill it all practically, the screw heads are horrible quality and the weather has been less than cooperative.

The garden is starting to come along, although even with my little fence, the deer still managed to take out 4 of 8 tomato plants. Right down to stalks. They are coming back, but I don't hold out much hope for anything from them. Something else got into it the other night (probably a cat) and may have gotten 2 of the 4 sunflowers I planted. Too early to tell yet on those.

One thing, I've been unable to recover any email I've sent since the end of March. Thunderbird seemed to all of a sudden stop placing a copy of it in my sent folder and I tried to create a new profile. When I did that I didn't do it entirely right and ended up losing all the mail I've sent (not really as it's in gmail's outbox) locally. This includes those I've sent with my other email accounts. Last night I mad ethe discovery in setting up an entirely new profile to replace the replacement, that there is a setting I'd overlooked in Thunderbird. I had been telling it to shove the sent mail into and individual account's sent mail folder and not the global sent mail folder. I may eventually recover those if I can, but I'm not too worried about it as most of my mail went through gmail anyway.

I've begun my concerted studying effort towards passing the USPS 932 ET test. I really like the idea of being an ET and working on something that's more concrete and in my hands than just processing mail on a VDT. This time I've forgone the computer, except to clarify what I believe are errors in texts that I'm studying. Today's clarification was about electron shells and how many electrons per subshell. See, lost a bunch of people already. I decided to go all the way back and start from the basics by using the US Navy NEETS courses that I found online. I found an error in the text about the subshells and went online to correct it in my notes. I decided that the computer was just getting in my way when trying to take notes. It also made it too easy to be distracted by this or that site and took time away from my studying.

I'm not sure what the posting levels around here will be. We've slowed down on our finance blog too. We're still following the plan but don't have much to report at the moment. I do think that 42% of our debt paid off in 5 months is awesome and while I know the rest of the year will show slower progress, we're committed to the plan to be debt free completely.

MediaMonkey Rocks!

2008-05-23T08:42:00.003-04:00

Very rarely will I say this, or promote a pay product, but I have to admit, MediaMonkey absolutely knocks my socks off. As a media manager it's just freakin' awesome. Get the Gold version, (it's 19.95) and you'll be happier. I'm using it and have been for a while now. The best way I can show why I like it is to show the pros and cons as I see them in the use I've had for the last month+ of dealing with it.

Pros:

Manages a large media library. I've got GB and GB of stuff on and off my hard drives. I've only just figured out the way of using it to keep track of my archived CDs. I can now see what I have in a simple search or in just going through the location list. Being able to search on cd/DVDs that have archives files on them is just simply awesome.

MP3 player syncing. Simply amazing. I have a COWON iAudio7, I'm using the generic USB driver for MM and it's fast and I can set up what directories I want things to go into automatically. It can also convert to whatever I want it to be format wise on the fly as it's syncing.

Podcasts. A new feature and still not ready for prime time completely. I have a few issues with the way it does things, but I now have it set up for all my podcasts (30+) and it's at least working in a manner I can deal with.

Cons:

Not free. Well, that can't be helped I guess. I can't deal with SongBird and I refuse to deal with Itunes. Neither worked well enough to make me want to keep them around. So 19.95. eyah. Okay not the best, but I spent 60+ years ago on Music Match for a lifetime sub and got burned when they went to version 10 as it didn't support win2k. 19.95 is not much to pay for this software when it does (mostly) everything I want it to. You can use the free version, but really, don't buy a pizza and drinks for 1 week and you've got the cost of this.

Device synch. While this works pretty well, I can't set up automatic directories based on what I'm syncing. See here's the problem. My player has Music, Podcasts, Audiobooks, etc... directories, and I want each category to go into the proper directory. I have to currently manually change the syncing filter to achieve this. Not a big gripe, but it's something that is not automatic and it's a little feature I'd love to see implemented someday. Oh, it also created read only directories on my player, so I have to connect it to the PC to delete the directories, I can still delete the individual files on it though, so just another annoyance

CD ordering. I'm using it to catalog CDs and it won't (to my knowledge) let me change how they are ordered in the Location tree from the order they were scanned in. Kind of an annoyance, but again, minor.

There's more I'm sure, but that gives you an idea. I really like this software and will continue to use it until I can find a free (source and cost) alternative that won't die on the huge amount of stuff I've got.

I only wish it also did video. I can't find a plugin to work with it yet.

Comcast Aquires Plaxo, I delete my Plaxo Account.

2008-05-17T18:14:00.002-04:00

I just found out about the Plaxo acquisition by Comcast. Not much else to say about it. I was always a little leery of Plaxo to begin with and now I certainly don't want them to have my data. So I permanently deleted my Plaxo account today. All my information is gone (supposedly) and I'll just have to hope they follow through on their promise to get rid of all my data.

Redoing the consolidation/backups

2008-05-16T00:30:00.002-04:00

Okay. Whatever problems I was having with the import into wordpress from blogger has disappeared. As usual this happens after I switch it all back and set up the 3 separate accounts for the 3 different blogs. Sometimes I hate technology. Actually, I hate buggy tech. So I think I'm just going to leave this crap alone for a while and not mess with it. At least I now have complete imports into Wordpress blogs in my virtual machine for all 3 blogs I'm currently running.

Changeover on posting

2008-05-11T02:04:00.006-04:00

I decided tonight to forgo all this extra logging in and crap, in relation to blogging, with all my different Google Accounts. So I figured there had to be some way to consolidate, or merge, or move a Google/Blogger account. Turns out there is a pretty easy method to do this and it is located right in Blogger's help system.

What I wanted to do was change the login id associated with this blog to the same one associated with my Debt-free blog. The method for doing it was simple, if tedious.

Basically turn it into a team blog. Send the invitation to the address you want to use, logout. Load your email client and get the invitation, and login to Blogger with that ID. Logout, again and log in with original ID, grant admin priv to new author. Logout. Login with new ID and remove old author from list. Lots of steps and you have to make sure to do the privilege granting as the blog has to have an admin user at all times. It can have more than one so that's fine as well.

In the end it only took a little bit, but now I wonder how to change all the older posts to published by the new ID. I think there's a way. Off to check it out.

[Later that same night...] Yeah there's a way, but it involves either following Blogger's idea of deleting and republishing the post (not going to happen with 255+ posts) or the easy way of changing the display name of the old profile/account to the same as the new one. This works, but you can never change it back in the profile of the old account. Even if you delete them as an author from the blog. So, I think I'll just leave it as it is and all the previous 254 posts will stay as wvmountainhome and all new posts will stay as Michael.

[5-16-08] Changed it all again thinking that maybe it's the consolidation that keeps wordpress from being able to log into it when I try to import to there. That's how I back up, with an install of wordpress in a debian-virtual machine here at home. Now to see if it works.

Growing up.

2008-05-10T00:07:00.004-04:00

So, Erin's growing like a weed, and with all the inherent joys, sometimes a moment just comes when you look at them and go, "Wow, you're moving way to fast." Like this morning. She grabbed my headset off the file cabinet and proceeded to move about the room, singing and talking into the mic. Then when I finally got them off after a few pictures, she lamented "Daddy, I was listening to some tunes!". I can't begin to tell you how much she means to me. Love you little girl.

Twitter

2008-05-09T02:29:00.002-04:00

I've been a member of twitter for just a short time and still haven't really seen the whole "thing" about it I guess. I mean, if you're sitting in front of a pc all day I guess it's kind of like having the IM client open all the time, but I've even stopped using IM much any more. Even though I never really used it much to begin with.

You can see I've added the updates to the site here, but I'm honestly not sure why I even continue to explore it. I added a bunch of podcasters that I listen to and found a friend who's made only a few posts - like only 5 days worth and the last one was a month ago.

So, I guess maybe I'm not one of those really connected people who has a large circle of folks to stay up to date on. I haven't even logged into Facebook in a month or more. So I begin to wonder if I should even keep my accounts in either place. Some days it's a toss up.

Local updates...

2008-05-07T01:47:00.003-04:00

The garden has been built and plants are now in it. This year I decided it would be easier to have a SMALL garden plot and since it's sometimes a small miracle to get access to a tiller, I went with building a raised bed that's about 4x4 in size. It's a little overpopulated I think at the moment, but we'll see what happens as they grow.

Erin helped plant a few things this time. Her idea was for peas - even though I'm sure I haven't seen her eat them since she was a baby. Tammy got her Snow pea seeds and I figure that's for the best. We planted a small row of the them about 3 feet long along the side of the bed so I can put up some wire for them to grow up later.

Also in that bed are 6 roma tomato plants, 2 cherry tomato plants, 2 bell peppers, a row of leaf lettuce, and a couple of sunflower seeds that might grow or might not. Erin helped plant and cover the peas, lettuce and sunflowers, but I wasn't about to let her handle the tomato plants, not yet anyway.

We also got strawberry plants at the Farmer's Market on Saturday (where we also got the romas) and I put them in a flower bed that we hadn't got around to deciding what to do with after 6 years here. I put the rest of the package of sunflowers there and some mexican sunflowers (tithonia) there in a row at the back of the bed.

When things start going well I may post a few pictures, I just haven't found the time to do that yet. I had to put up a fence around the garden bed to keep the deer out. I went through that last time and was so annoyed with them that I think that's one reason we didn't do it last year.

Hopefully it's done better this time and I can keep my vegetables for us instead of the local wildlife.

I guess I've been busy, so that's why the flurry of posts on all the blogs. And now I think it's almost 2am, so it's time to shut this thing down and go to sleep. Night.

AVG 8 - FAIL

2008-05-07T00:17:00.004-04:00

While I encourage all people to upgrade their AV protection on a regular basis, I've been blown away by the extremely poor way this release was implemented. Given that I use the free version, so I'm not making them any money anyway, they probably care less. I however care a great deal. I recommend AVG to all my friends and others that I do tech support for.

My big gripe - Linkscanner and the inability to select a component of AVG to not install or to remove in an easy - non threatening, checkbox driven way. I managed to find a way to get rid of the LinkScanner, but it wasn't clear and not something I'd ever have a client or relative do unless I was very sure they wouldn't mistype something at a command prompt. That's right folks. An install/repair/remove feature that is currently only accessible from the command line. The procedure for this is up on my tech blog.

So here's my idea for the next program update to this release, put a component removal section in so we can get this garbage out without resorting to command line switches that will be more than intimidating to some people. I don't have a problem with it, but those I support will. So do I now start recommending another AV product? I guess time will tell.

My own reasoning for not wanting this LinkScanner in is maybe a bit tin-foil of me, but when I go to a search engine, or page, I don't expect anything to be acting in ANY way upon links unless I explicitly tell it to. From what I saw earlier, this thing was checking all links on a google search I did and I won't have that folks. I disabled pre-fetching in Firefox just exactly because of things like this. Which if you're interested you can see how to do that over at MountainhomeTechInfo.

Things like this just really bug me. Not to mention the fact that you can't install anything without it coming with some stupid toolbar. Hey here's an idea, cut out all the extraneous stuff and give me a smaller download (AVG8 is 45+MB, effing ridiculous) and I'll be very happy and appreciative in my review of the product.

Oh well. Another chance to check out free AV vendors again.

More trash gone!

2008-05-04T19:59:00.003-04:00

Ah the old 3.5" floppies, the cases for them, the os/2 backup disks for a computer that has bit the dust long ago. I cleaned out a file cabinet on Saturday and not only did I get rid of all but a small shoebox of disks and some other minor tech items (memory, webcam, etc), I also got rid of the file cabinet! It was falling apart and I really don't need it, so it's gone as well.

I'm finally letting go of stuff I haven't used in years. It's been a general cleanup weekend for me as I've also cleaned up the porch out back so it's usable again. Did some other yard work - garden is finally in. 6 Romas, 2 Cherry tomatos, 2 bell peppers, snow peas, lettuce and sunflowers. I also devoted a bed to strawberries (3 plants) and hope to see some results this year.

It's all definitely starting to come together outside now. This is really the first extended time I've sat in front of the computer all weekend. Other than about 20 minutes this morning I haven't been on since Friday. Feels kind of good actually.

Decluttering

2008-05-01T23:36:00.002-04:00

Ah, the word that strikes joy into my wife's heart, and fear into most others'. So, we're trying to get rid of stuff we don't use, don't need, etc... For me that has meant one whole shelf of computer books. Donated to my local public library. Also as I've been going through my music with MediaMonkey, I'm finding that I had a great deal of these in CD form already, so I'm dumping the cassette tapes that are dupes that I had. I figure for most we can get a few cents at a yard sale. Anything is gravy considering that most of them haven't been listened to in a while. Read years.

It's nice to see the office and family room get cleaned out a little bit. Oh we also dumped a whole bunch of old VHS tapes where I had taped movies and shows off the TV years ago. Especially ones that haven't seen the light of day for many years.

It's nice to be able to start letting go of a lot of this stuff. It's actually easy once you get over that first hump.

More on MediaMonkey

2008-04-28T13:09:00.002-04:00

I have been messing around with Media Managers and have come to the conclusion that I like MediaMonkey the best. I have hopes that it will eventually work a lot better with podcasts and such by having more options available, but for now the other features outweigh that minor inconvenience.

It's a very good program for cataloging all my music and the file tagging and renaming features are excellent. I like the Auto-Organize feature as I can now standardize all my tracks to the same filename format.

There are a lot of great features to this program and I'll go over more of them later, but the one that made this program work for me in the end was the ease with which it connects to my iAudio7 mp3 player. The syncing feature (I use the manual one) works well and I used the generic USB setup for it. That feature alone has made it much easier for me to dump music onto my player. I'll get over the podcast syncing problems since this will make life much simpler when I'm trying to find something in my collection.

New items

2008-04-23T13:24:00.002-04:00

I've added some new items up at our debt recovery blog. Progress bars for our emergency fund and our debt payoff. Credit for the idea comes from SensetoSave. I took the html and reworked it for our site, removing the image and changing the color to make it blend more.

Also 2 new posts are up, but nothing major yet. Pop by and let us know what you think.

Finding Our Solid Ground

2008-04-19T16:16:00.002-04:00

We've had the topic of finances a bit here and I've (we've) decided it would be best to set up a blog together to do this thing right. So while I'll let you know that we've added content to it, I'm not going to be really making any further financial type posts here, unless I think it's a really good idea.

So I'd like to introduce you to our new debt to solvency and more blog -

Finding Our Solid Ground - A debt recovery and financial peace blog.

Yes it's a blogspot hosted blog. Yes there will be some restrained advertising on it. Not like the stuff over here on the side. We all know how to block that stuff if we really don't want to see it.

The information and story we share is personal, and sometimes painful to admit to. Especially some of the stupider things we've done with money. More of those posts will come up in the future. For now what's up there is an introduction. It might start out a little long, but please continue to the end.

Please direct all comments concerning that blog to it and not over here. These will remain pretty separate from each other with only a little promotion of it going on here. Thanks for reading it. Thanks for anything you have to say about it. Most of all though, thanks for anything you might learn from it. That's what it's there for.

Media Library software

2008-04-11T02:10:00.003-04:00

After much time spent ripping and converting from audio tape and the like, I have ended up finally with a master MP3 directory of about 75GB. That's over 20000 tracks. So when I go looking for a media player/collection manager, I have some very specific requirements. Good search capabilities. Won't screw with my files, unless I do it myself, not auto crap. Won't force me to do a lot of work outside the application to manage my collection.

I had hoped that Songbird was the answer, but unfortunately it's just not there yet. It's good and I like it, especially the open part, but it's way too slow to go through my library. I ended up putting Itunes on my system (shudder, yuck, blech!) and was going to keep it, but I just found this thing called MediaMonkey. It's currently importing the tracks. I'll try it out and see just how good it is.

That didn't take too long. It is amazing though that with 3 separate media library programs that I get 3 different totals on files. Oh well. I've been playing with the tagging features and I'm starting to like this one real well. I think ITunes just lost it's place on the hard drive. Even after the huge amount of time it took to load the library the first time. MediaMonkey was so much quicker. Expect to hear more about this one from me.

Credit limits ≠ "money in account"

2008-03-28T13:03:00.002-04:00

You'll remember that Tammy and I are working our way to a solid financial footing, instead of the slightly mushy footing we have felt we were on. Part of that of course is working on paying down our debt. We have a credit card (2 actually) and had transferred all but a couple hundred dollars off the one to get a better rate on the other. That's the only reason we opened the second card. We figured 0% on transfers and any new purchases for the next year was a sufficient reason to change cards.

As part of this pay it all off mentality, we paid the last little bit on the Citi Card a month ago. I mention the name to give you notice of what happened next. This month we got another bill, but not of course with a zero balance, but with $1.08 in finance charges on it. Ok, not the best response when we opened the bill, but in the end we decided it might actually cost them more to process the check than it was worth to complain over the phone to them.

Tammy called on Wed. to find out if our balance was finally $0. Lo and behold it was. Then she said the words all CSRs hate to hear, "Cancel It.". There then proceeded the strong push to keep the card. Silence fell when he found out what rate we got from Capitol One. "That's hard to beat." In the end after much talking and persuading, in which I had gotten impatient and felt like taking the phone myself, she managed to get him to cancel the card. It was funny as she was cutting the cards up while she was talking to the guy. Hope he heard the snips of the scissors.

The thing that made me actually post this today was in thinking over some of the things he told her, one thing in particular. You see she has had this card for a long time and we've both been very good, responsible customers (not the best for us, but anyway), never late or skimping on making payments. She had a pretty high credit limit. When she finally got him to cancel, and got off the phone she told me that the CSR had said, "But you have $20,000 in the account!".

There's the rub. A credit limit is just that. It's not money you have "in the account". I know people will not read into this statement what I do. I've become very leery of anything having to do with credit. My history with the cards is not so good, and it took a long time to recover, with Tammy's help, which made it feel worse to me. The point I want everyone to get here, and what I got out of this statement, is this - People look at a credit limit as money in the bank. It's not. It's what you are being loaned. At a APR that is crushing. You'd never buy a car or a house with an interest rate of 19.98% would you? Why would you buy anything else at that rate? Money "in an account" means actually currency in there, not some computer's idea of how much you can bear to pay back.

I'm annoyed by the way the phrase was used, even if it's not what was intended. People you really need to think about what your money is going for and where it's being spent. The culture and idea that you have to go into debt to live is going to eat you alive in the end. I've seen the way that it could have gone for me not so many years ago. I'm glad and amazed at the turnaround I've made in my thinking and in my practices. We're a few months into our final return to the path that we need to be on and we're both in such high spirits about what will happen when we finally pay this beast off in a few months. The peace of mind you get when you know how much you have and how much you can spend is amazing. Not doing it at all on credit is even more amazing. I'll follow this up later this weekend with some more thoughts, but for now... think about what it would be like to not have those crushing payments. It's a wonderful thing to contemplate isn't it.

Spam abounds

2008-03-25T01:51:00.002-04:00

It's been a heck of a long time since I took the time to write anything up relating to spam comments, but it appears to have become a problem again. I'll just paste the relevant info here and maybe try to make people understand that they really aren't that freaking anonymous on the internet. Sure it's probably a damn bot, but it's just annoying. I allow anonymous comments because I think to not do so inhibits the "conversation" that can go on through comments. I'm not an idiot though. I moderate every single comment that comes through here and it galls me to think that people think they can just plaster their commercials up here in my comments. So let's just say it once again - I don't allow commercial promotion in the comments of my blog. Yeah you see google ads over on the side, but that's different and anyone with a modicum of ability can figure out how to block those from showing up.

Tonight's spam brought to you by an Indian ISP and promoting furniture for an italian site. Below is the relevant whois data for the promoted site and along with it my sitemeter logs for the address that left it.

Spammed site info:

Domain: momi.it
Status: ACTIVE
Created: 1999-06-29 00:00:00
Last Update: 2007-07-22 15:15:50
Expire Date: 2008-05-17

Registrant
Name: Momi srl
ContactID: MOMI10-ITNIC
Address: Via Germania 3
Negrar
37024
VR
IT
Created: 2007-03-01 10:53:44
Last Update: 2007-07-22 15:15:50

Admin Contact
Name: Zanoni Fiorenza
ContactID: ZF110-ITNIC
Address: Via Germania 3
Negrar
37024
VR
IT
Created: 1999-06-28 00:00:00
Last Update: 2007-03-01 07:38:35

Technical Contacts
Name: Raffaele Prati
ContactID: RP2893-ITNIC
Organization: VIRTUAL ITALY SAS
Address: Via dal Molin,14/d
Desenzano Del Garda
25015
BS
IT
Created: 1999-09-21 00:00:00
Last Update: 2007-03-06 14:29:23

Registrar
Organization: Virtual Italy S.a.s. di Raffaele Prati e C.
Name: VIRTUALITALY-MNT

Nameservers
ns2.virtual-italy.it
ns3.virtual-italy.it
dns3.nic.it

Spammed from this IP address:

Domain Name airtelbroadband.in ? (India)
IP Address 122.162.124.# (ABTS DELHI)
ISP Bharti Broadband
Location
Continent : Asia
Country : India (Facts)
State/Region : Delhi
City : New Delhi
Lat/Long : 28.6, 77.2 (Map)
Distance : 7,620 miles
Language English (U.S.)
en-us
Operating System Microsoft Win2000
Browser Internet Explorer 6.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Javascript version 1.3
Monitor
Resolution : 800 x 600
Color Depth : 24 bits
Time of Visit Mar 25 2008 1:40:41 am
Last Page View Mar 25 2008 1:40:41 am
Visit Length 0 seconds
Page Views 1
Referring URL http://www.google.it...hl=it&start=400&sa=N
Search Engine google.it
Search Words blogspot furniture
Visit Entry Page http://wvmountainhome.blogspot.com/
Visit Exit Page http://wvmountainhome.blogspot.com/
Out Click
Time Zone UTC+6:00
Visitor's Time Mar 25 2008 12:10:41 pm

my only annoyance with sitemeter is that the free service doesn't give me the entire IP address. I'd have to pay for that. Not going to happen I think. Oh well.

How to Behave on the Internet

2008-03-17T00:24:00.005-04:00

I got online tonight as I was having trouble getting back to sleep, and while skimming the JoCo (Jonathon Coulton) Forums , I ran across a link to the video below (if it embeds properly, otherwise you'll see a link only). It was funny to me and hopefully to you as well. It's ending pretty much reminds me of Wheaton's new tag line - "Don't be a dick." Just one of those things that for some reason we seem to need to tell people these days. So, in that spirit - here's the video or link whichever appears as I past this in.

How To Behave On An Internet Forum

It's alive!

2008-03-14T00:34:00.002-04:00

I've been very lax in putting anything up on my tech blog, but I have been working on backing up my Wordpress and Blogger blog posts and thought I'd share the writeup. I've only got the Wordpress one online so far, but the Blogger one will be up before Monday.

New Furniture

2008-03-13T13:11:00.002-04:00

We finally took delivery of Erin's new headboard and bookcase today. These are the follow up purchases to last year's dresser purchase.
She enjoyed the delivery until they started drilling the holes for the headboard. Then it was "What's with all that racket?!" at the top of her lungs of course.

I thought I'd post a couple of photos up so you could see them. We have been buying all our wood furniture from Nature's Furniture on Smith Street in Charleston. It's one of the few exceptions I'll make to the not buying anything within the city limits rule.

We have over the years been replacing older worn out furniture with new and we really like the solid wood. It will last a long time and I think it's great looking as well. The bookcase was a little smaller than the one she had in there, but that just means we get to get rid of a little more clutter.

The shape of things to come.

2008-03-12T08:36:00.004-04:00

So I have managed to finally get my Debian VM setup the way I like it. I also recently set up the local webserver on it and now have a testbed from which to a) Keep a backup of all my WP/Blogger sites/posts/comments and b) Try things out before I do them.

Now as I am using only free hosting at the moment (Blogger.com and Wordpress.com) I can only do some very limited things. I have imported all 3 sites I still do anything with (there are more out there I don't) into separate Wordpress installs. I like Wordpress, I always have, but WP.com will not allow me to do anything commercial, so I can only do that little deal here on Blogger. That's all I'm going to say about that.

So where does that leave me? I'm going to have full backups of posts AND comments. The idea being that I can just keep importing from Blogger on a regular basis (weekly/monthly depending on amount of activity) and eventually when it reaches a certain point move back over into a hosted domain/site that will hopefully be a permanent thing. I like blogger and it's been good to me, but I need the hosted site for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is to have to control I crave over all aspects of the site. That I think is enough about that for now.

In the content area, after a lot of thought and discussion, I have made a decision about some posting that is going to start occurring here. Some of you know and some won't, that my wife and I have begun a pretty intense financial revamp of our lives. We are not in bad shape, but like everyone we could be better. I'll get into some specifics about things later, but what I want to let people know is that I'm working on a mini-financial series of posts and will be putting them up along with my regular (semi-regular, biannual, whatever... ) posts. They will all have a specific tag related to them so they'll be very easy to find. In having this discussion in the open, with all the possible people looking in on it, we'll definitely be keeping some specific info private, but a lot of the general things we are doing will be laid out.

Sometimes the things you have to do NOW is not what you WANT to do, but what you NEED to do to make it work.

I'd like you to keep that thought in mind. I'm going to give a lot of credit in our financial revamp to my wife, and to Dave Ramsey. I'm not inclined to get all overcome with praise for most things, but I think a lot of people would get a little bit of peace of mind in their lives if they had fewer money worries. Take a minute to check out Ramsey's website. Check his books out of the library (Hey they're there, it's a very good use of time and effort even though they don't cost that much to begin with) before you would buy them.

A few years ago we bought "Total Money Makover". The concepts and ideas in there have made a difference in our lives. What I want to do is show you how we are working things out, generally, and maybe give you an incentive to do it yourself. I want to be clear up front. I do not in any way represent or profit from any recommendation that I'm making here in regards to Mr. Ramsey and his methods. They are working for us and might work for others. Maybe it's true that word of mouth is the best recommendation you can give. I don't want this to become an ad for Mr. Ramsey, so I'll try to stay pretty general.

I hope this makes some sense, because this was really supposed to be just a short post about upcoming plans.

My First week with my new Cowon iAudio 7

2008-02-18T13:58:00.006-05:00

Being the kind of person I am, I usually want to wait a while before making a short product review. That being said, I'm going to give my first impressions of my new MP3 player. It's a COWON iAudio 7 4GB player. I used to have a COWON U3 2GB player, but it went downwhill quite fast and it put me off these little flash players for well over a year. I went back to burning MP3's to CD and using my old SONY PSYC CD player to listen to them. (Couldn't find a product page for the CD player so this link goes to a review site).

Now as most of my time at work is spent in front of a pc and it's not a very demanding job, I like to listen to podcasts. A lot of them. So I needed a player that could handle a lot of use and not lose it's battery life too quickly. That was one of the problems with my old U3, it lost it's ability to stay charged and eventually dropped so far down the line that it was only staying on for about an hour at best. It also had a major problem with the headphone jack, after only about a month or so of use it would only play in one side of the headphones. After 2 months it started the battery thing and I quickly lost heart with it and went back to the CDs.

So you may wonder why I'd go with COWON for another player. Well. I wondered the same thing myself. As it turns out, I'm a sucker for specs. I also believe I just happened to get a bad U3 and it wasn't indicative of the brand itself. Plus time has allowed me to see that if I had really tried I probably could have gotten a replacement, but I never really tried to. So that's MY fault.

So let's get to the iAudio 7. Let's get to the main specs first:

4GB Flash memory - More than enough for an 8 hour day of listening.
60 Hrs battery life - Claimed by manufacturer. Don't believe it. All reviews I've seen place it at around 40+ for audio only and 23+ for video. I can't give you any idea. I've plugged it in about 4 of 7 nights when I come home and it's always fully charged by morning. Even after 8+ hours of use and one day where I didn't charge it on purpose, I never got any indication that the battery was even down at all. It has 4 indicator bars and I've never gotten down to just having 3 yet. Then again, I've only had it for a week
MP3 OGG WMA FLAC WAV ASF and MPEG4 (video) playback - Only tested MP3 and OGG so far. Does better on ogg than the U3 did. Ogg drained the battery on the U3 real fast.

Now that's just the prelim specs and commentary. Let's talk about this thing. It's small. It's very light and decently well made. I was concerned about the "Swing-Touch" interface after reading about it and it is quite sensitive. I had it on while raking leaves the other day and it would swing around and hit my chest (I wear it on a lanyard around my neck) and the song would change or pause or something. It doesn't like gloves. So I had to keep taking mine off to change it back. I ended up using the hold button so it would just keep playing. Definitely use the hold button if planning on putting it in a pocket.

The interface takes just a little bit of getting used to. It UI for the player is very similar to the interface the U3 had, so I had no problems with it at all. It has a speaker in it that gives you chirps or beeps when using the interface, but you can turn that off and I did real quick. It gets annoying fast when it's chirping at you.

The sound quality really depends on your headphones. Whatever kind you get I do recommend getting a pair with a right angle connector to alleviate the strain on the headphone jack. I haven't had a problem yet, but I don't want to end up listening to it out of one ear again, so I'm just taking real good care of the headphone jack as much as I can.

I think I still have the plastic cover on the actual screen portion of mine, but I can tell you one thing. This whole device is shiny reflective plastic. It's just a fingerprint magnet. There's no way to keep it free of them if you use the controls a lot. Plan on polishing a lot if you want to keep it looking pristine.

What comes in the package. The player, a set of headphones (I didn't use them as I was familiar with the quality of the last pair I got from COWON), a standard USB cable, a driver disk for win98/ME, plus software to install (JetAudio Basic). No Lanyard (I'm using one I got with a usb drive), no AC adapter (still have the one from the U3), no direct USB adapter (so you can plug it right into a frontpanel USB port, the U3 came with one) and very little in the way of usable instructions. There's a 4 page quick install guide (4 pages in just about any language you want that is). The Manual is in PDF form on the CD. But you can download one from COWON, which I did before I ever bought it.

Mine came with firmware 1.16 installed. 1.17 is out on COWON's website and I upgraded it before I ever used it the first time. To upgrade, read COWON's instructions and add this to it "copy over all .BIN files to the root directory of the device". If you don't copy both .BIN files, you won't get all the new icons and you'll get a "missing resource" error. The upgrade is easy. NO sweat about it at all.

So, what is left to talk about for a player that I've had one week. The Swing-Touch interface takes a bit of getting used to. It's a whole lot better than the Joystick method the U3 had. Don't touch the record button while listening to the radio unless you really want to record radio. For the sake of your own sanity DO NOT use the AUTOSCAN feature for the radio. It just doesn't work well. If you have it or can find it online find the JetShell program and us it to set the radio stations. Otherwise it will be a tedious experience. Tune to channel, hold play button, assign to memory. Repeat. Up to 24 times. Thankfully I don't have many stations I can get in my area. Only about 10.

If anyone has any questions, let me know. Remember I've only had this thing a little over a week now.

Oh almost forgot. I got it from Newegg.com (love that place) and it was $120. I got it in about 3 business days and except for the problem of UPS NOT getting a signature and not ringing the bell, just leaving it on the step (pain in the ass delivery drivers). While I was at newegg I also got a USB card reader for my pc. I'm tired of using Kodak's easyshare software to pull my pictures off the camera. It keeps changing the actual file dates which makes it really hard to organize them as I like to. So that was a nice little $7 there. It works so that's all I care about.

Oh another thing, the iAudio really needs a USB2.0 connection or it is a dog transferring files over. So that's my short 1 week review and I'll add other entries later as I find things I either like or dislike about it.

Mish-Mash

2008-02-17T17:44:00.003-05:00

What's going on right now...

Pretty much everyone in the house is on the recovery end of a cold. Tammy excluded.

I'm in the middle of a 3 day weekend.

I'm trying to convert songs on my tapes over to mp3 files to get rid of the tapes and remove some clutter from the house.

I'm not able to do that job quickly as I need a great deal of time in front of the PC to do it.

Long weekends are a blessing and a curse.

Caffeine is a wonderful drug.

I drink entirely too much of it.

I think I'll be up late tonight just piddling on the PC.

Ah, to be well again.

2008-02-10T12:21:00.000-05:00

So again I'm sitting here coughing away while I type. I can't do this very long or I get even worse. I've been bitten with some nasty bug since Friday and can barely breathe. I'm dosed to the gills with Benydryl and Delsym. Las tnight was the worst sleep in a while.

Today I had the joy of getting the tires changed on the Toyota. They were pretty bad and I thought it was just the tires themselves, but it turns out the front end was WAY out of alignment. So that put another 80-100 bucks onto the bill. Not much point in putting the 4 new tires on though if we didn't get the alignment. So now it drives so MUCH better than it used to. Glad to have that taken care of.

Well I can't sit here any longer, so I'm going to go cough up a lung somewhere and see if I'm still going to be able to live without one.

Hypocrisy, Theft and stupid politicians.

2008-02-04T23:41:00.000-05:00

I hate to beat an apparently dead horse, but I will as it still P***** me off to no end. Tonight I checked the Daily Mail and was pleased to see at least one place that had voters with enough sense to reject an idiotic "User Fee" (read TAX!). It seems that 80% of Monongalia County voters that actually went to the polls Saturday voted the proposed $2 a week tax down. I giggled immensely at it.

As everyone knows the Barony of Jones (Charleston) has now raised their flagrantly illegal/immoral tax on workers in the City to $2 a week, $104 a year. That's money that I'll never see any benefit from. More importantly that's money that Charleston will never see any benefit from. I do my best to not spend any money at any business inside Charleston's city limits.

Now what made me name my post "Hypocrisy, Theft and stupid Politicians" was the finishing paragraphs of the article. The quote by Baron Jones was particularly enraging.

"If you would have asked the public in Charleston to vote for a user fee (in 2004), they would have voted against it 4 to 1," Jones said. "It was only until after they saw results did they vote for it by an overwhelming majority."

Well boo hoo hoo. I didn't get to vote for it and you're taking money out of MY check you jackass. I see no benefit to you getting a dime of my money when I live, and CHOSE to live in South Charleston. We have better city services, better environment, fewer people and at least for now less stupid people running our city.

Mr. Jones, that $104 a year is not helping you pay for the minor time I'm in your crummy city. You won't provide more police around my workplace, you don't stop all these panhandlers from harassing us on our parking lots. I don't use your city services at all. My company pays for it's water and all utilities. I barely run on any roads not maintained by the state. Your stupid Clay Center has and the new plans for the library (which used to include a parking garage we could have used) will take the last vestiges of parking we use. That's 500 plus people getting high wages that will no longer have anyplace to park. How long can we keep our jobs in the city at that rate?

Your inability to see the complete inequity in the situation of asking people who don't live in your city to support it astounds me to this day. Cut services or raise taxes on those inside the city. Cut your salary. Cut the salaries of those in the city government. Don't make the mistake of thinking that everyone is just going to go along with the continual theft of money from those outside your city limits. Eventually things are going to have to change. Making your living off the backs of those who are given no voice in your ironclad rule of the city will come back to haunt the city, or the next set of Mayors and Councils. Someday, someone will decide it's enough. Then we'll get our rights to vote on this theft. We'll demand to be heard and we'll demand to be given back our money that's only going for paving streets in South Hills and ripping up streets and paving them again. How many times will you all rip up crosswalks and then replace them? Take the bricks out, put the bricks back. Make up your damn mind will ya?

So that's my rant for today. Stop taking my dime to support yourself and learn to balance your damn books with what you have, not what you feel you can take with impunity.

Virtual XP inside XP

2008-02-03T10:29:00.001-05:00

In my effort to keep my current XP install as clean as possible, plus my inherent distrust of savings websites, etc.., I have been setting up a Virtual copy of XP inside of my current version. I'm using VirtualPC 2007 this time instead of VMware, but that's just for testing reasons. I like VMWare better. I'm planning on using this as a way to let my wife install cupon printing software from various websites. I refuse to let them be installed on the physical machine, so I'll try a virtual one.

I still don't feel good about it, but at least I can blow it away and bring out a saved copy of it when I need to. I'll be using AV software as well as packet sniffers to maintain control over what goes on on the VM. I will not be adding in the shared folders or any other type of crossover software to allow something to jump across the VM barrier. I'll have to do a bit of VM education for Tammy but that won't be too hard at all. She's taken to Thunderbird and OpenOffice pretty well, even if she still grouses a bit once in a while.

All in all the upgrade from 2000 to XP has been pretty painless, except for a few minor problems. Most notable is the digital camera debacle. Why in hell can't it just see the stupid camera as a drive? That's the most efficient and most normal method ever. That's my other complaint about all these mp3 players out there. A lot of the one's I'd like to get with a certain set of features are requiring XP only or something stupid like that. Just show up as usb drive and let people drag and drop their music. How hard is that idea to grasp? Everything is DRM free now, just go buy it at Amazon. MTP is dead. Sony Connect is dead, all the other pay for sites with restrictive DRM are dead (except apple, which will hopefully fall this coming year).

[Sorry for the divergent topics, but I'm on a roll]

DRM itself is dead. Nobody seems to understand, it's just like the quote from "Star Wars", paraphrased and adapted for the subject - "The tighter your grip the more will slip out through your fingers." I read with great glee the fact that Amazon is buying Audible. I read it with more when I saw the statement that they would keep the DRM unless the customers complained. So everyone who has an Audible account needs to write Amazon and complain about the DRM not letting you move your legally purchased audiobooks from computer to computer and player to player, or requiring a special Audible player.

So now maybe I can get off the soapbox about DRM being the stupidest thing on the planet. I encourage everyone to drop Itunes as a purchasing outlet and go to Amazon, or even better go to eMusic. I loved eMusic when I tried them. I got to find a lot of new music that wasn't as overproduced and marketed as what's on the front page of Itunes/Amazon. Anyway, maybe I'll sign back up at eMusic when I get my new player. I've already selected the one I want. A Cowon Iaudio 7. It's a 4GB flashplayer with an average (tested by reviewers) battery life of around 40-45hrs for strictly audio or 23 hrs for video. They claim 60hrs, but manufacturer's claims are never indicative of real world performance. I know mine will get a workout as I usually use my MP3 CD player about 7 hours a day at work.

So with that I'll stop for now and I'm sorry for the rambling but I have a 4 year old distracting me at the moment and I now have to go play Chutes N Ladders with her, so BYE for now.

LEGOs - 50th Anniversary

2008-01-29T08:36:00.000-05:00

I always loved LEGOs. Just the fun of making things and then using my own imagination to play. Toys these days are just too complex and do all you imagining for you. Happy 50th to a toy that has given millions of kids and adults the joy of building and made them use their own imaginations for play.

Google, Calendar, Thunderbird, and Imap

2008-01-18T11:02:00.000-05:00

Today I went about setting up a new account for our family. We now have a family email address. I decided to do this to make it easier for people to get things to both of us, plus I wanted to set up a shared Google Calendar so we could maybe keep things appointments in our minds a little more. Since we both use Thunderbird as our email client now, it's pretty easy to do this.

First of course you need to set up an account with Google. After creating this one, I went into the settings for that account and enables IMAP. Now Imap will let you log on from anywhere with a client program that supports it and it keeps all your mail on their server. It doesn't get deleted when it downloads to you like a POP server does.

Nest you need to have the Lightning extension for Thunderbird installed, along with the Provider for Google Calendar extension. These are easy to install, but you have to download them to your machine with your browser first and then install them through the Add-Ons dialog in Thunderbird. (for those that are wanting more info or a walkthrough, I'll try to get some screen shots and maybe even a flash video up sometime this weekend over on my techinfo blog.)

Now just follow the directions that you get from Google for setting up the account in thunderbird and it's off the our calendar. Once you get the google calendar up, go to settings, then select calendars and then select your calendar from the list. This will get you into the calendar details. It's a pain to go through so many screens, but believe me you need to to get the last bit of info for Provider. Scroll down and you'll see Calendar Address. It will have 3 Icons there and you need to get the link under the XML Icon. Just right click it and chose "copy link location". Then with that in your clipboard, you can go into thunderbird and click the Calendar icon on the bottom left. This will give you your calendar and you can then create a new one. Do this by either right-clicking in the area where it says calendar name and choosing new-calendar or go to File>new>calendar. Tell it the Calendar is "On The Network", then click next. Under Format choose Google Calendar, and under location paste in the link location you copied.

Give it a name and choose a color for the events on that one (very important). Then you're done! Make sure when creating events and appointments that you have that calendar selected on the side or it will only save it to your home calendar.

I'll get a better more outlined writeup done this weekend for the techinfo site. Hope this helps someone get started.

Snapfish jumping the gun on expiring free credits?

2008-01-17T20:07:00.000-05:00

Well, I got this email tonight (this morning actually, but I didn't see it until tonight) from Snapfish.com . They want to be helpful and tell me that the free 50 credits I have for 4x6 prints are going to expire. Well actually what they want to do is scare me into thinking that they will expire soon. You see the email is titled "Your 50 credits are expiring". It is like those magazine renewals you get 1 month after you subscribe.

See, I only created a Snapfish account on January 3rd. By signing up and uploading photos you got 50 free 4x6 prints. They will expire in 60 days. That's 3-3-08. So today after only being a snapfish member for 14 days, they've decided to try to scare me into using my credits NOW. OMG!! USE THEM NOW BEFORE IT"S TOO LATE, THEY EXPIRE ON MARCH 3RD!!!!

Wow. That's just so dumb. You see, maybe unlike other people who sign up with Snapfish, I know when they expire. I read all the terms of the deal and I actually am a proactive person when it comes to doing things like this. So I don't need fear-mongering reminders that my free stuff is going to expire. You see, I believe in just that little bit of personal responsibility. It's really up to me to keep track of that Snapfish, and while I thank you for your desire to inform me of the fact that my free credits expire a month and a half from now, I wish you'd not try to scare me into using them now by saying "Your 50 credits are expiring" when they really aren't.

Politics

2008-01-14T23:57:00.000-05:00

Ok, we all know just how little I ever really go into this, but you could say one of my "Resolutions" was to become more involved/informed about things going on. You see, I hear a news story and sometimes I just go apeshit. So to keep from doing that and to keep myself informed as well as or more likely better than the "real media" as they like to call themselves, I've decided to start paying more attention to the news and start getting as much as I can handle.

As much as I can handle will probably not be too much honestly. I despise stupidity and Congress is loaded with it. So are the Executive and Judicial Branches. I am an equal opportunity believer in stupidity. All parties involved in politics have their own varying degrees of it.

So after that is said, why am I bringing this up here? Well, I ran across something today that I like. It's called OpenCongress.org. It's a way to track your Congress Critters and bills and the like and I've decided to make an account there. I've started tracking all my state's Delegation and included those that don't directly represent me as well. I'm only tracking a couple of bills right now, but as I get more into it I'll have more up there.

What I think everyone should do is, even if you don't use this site to do it, become more aware of who represents you and what they are doing. What the entire government is doing and how they are spending your money. If you follow the links from OpenCongress back to The Sunlight Foundation, you'll find a link over to "Insanely Useful Websites". I urge everyone to go by there and just see what kind of information you can glean from it. Come on folks! Take the time to invest yourself in your government. Take it back from those that would keep you from knowing about what's going on. Take the new year to drop the apathy from your shoulders and for once learn about why we really are the greatest country on the face of the planet. We are, but we're losing it fast. Every day our original freedoms get chipped away at a little more. Every day our world becomes more and more like a scene from the political horror novels we once read in school.

I can't change your mind about things. Only you can. Only you can gather up the knowledge to make yourself better informed. Only you can take the time. These places are making it so much easier to find this stuff out. Find out where the money comes from, where it goes and who is getting it. Find out who used to work in Congress and then gets a high paying lobbyist job in an industry they used to help regulate.

You are your own best hope in this. You are your only hope. You have the power and ability to make the time in your life to do this.

And Now...back to our regularly scheduled craptastic posts about insignificant things in my life.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T00:07:00.000-05:00

So I figured it was about time to get on with a post and this is as good a time as any. Things are going fine here and we've had a pretty good end to the year. Erin's birthday (4) was today (31st as I started typing this) and it went well. I got her doll house put together and in a couple of days I'll post some photos of her with it. It's pretty big, she can stand up straight and peer in the 3rd floor window. It's from Imaginarium™ and it's wood with a little bit of plastic to it. Made for 12" "fashion dolls" - read Barbies™.

We took her to her first actual movie today - "Enchanted". She's watched plenty of DVDs and been to 2 Kids Concerts (Doodlebops and Playhouse Disney Live) so far, but we've always been a little reluctant to go that extra step and take her to an actual movie.

Enchanted was good. About what I expected it to be and I'll tell you now that if you have a sensitive kid or one that gets upset easily about things, there are a couple of things to watch out for in this one. Erin's only problems were when Giselle's tiara was taken by the street bum (Mommy, he took her jeweled tiara! bring it back!) and of course the very end with the Sorceress/dragon when it carried off Patrick Dempsey's character. Me of course could have cared less if Dempsey fell but that wouldn't have happened in the flick so, oh well. But she was pretty upset about it.

All in all though she did really well for a 1hr 47min movie. She danced and mostly talked quietly with a few exceptions.

I'm currently in the process of setting up our PC with windows XP. Yeah I know, but I need it for a few things still and I had to use some software that will just not install under windows 2000. I'm currently almost finished to the point of us being able to use it for daily stuff, but I'm still copying over mail and other minor things to get it done. I was quite unhappy to find out that it is now having a problem with my digital camera. I have a Kodak Easyshare DX4530 camera and under W2K I was able to see it just as a drive and pull the files off. This is my most preferred method if interaction. Unfortunately it refuses to show up as a drive under XP and I have to use the crappy Easyshare software to pull photos off of the stupid thing. This of course resets the file modified date and it makes it a much longer process to get my photos sorted into individual daily folders.

I am thinking that it might finally be time to invest in a multi-card reader for the home system and just pull the SD card out and do things that way. At least it still shows up as a drive in Ubuntu.

Other than that not much happening here. More colds/illnesses and downright nasty headaches have abounded through the house for the last couple of weeks. My neighbor's having his New year's party and it's a bit more subdued this year than previous. Maybe they got complaints after last year. Way too many people with cars parked all over the place on other people's property.

Anyway, I wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year and hope this year brings you all what you hope for.

what's up?

2007-12-20T00:28:00.000-05:00

I probably have 4 posts sitting in draft form right now and I'll just say this about them... they'll all be posted up later. Not sure when, but sometime when I can finish my thoughts out and not stay up until all hours of the night trying to think coherently.

First off as notice, it's December, the USPS is almost done with hell week and I'm just waiting it out. I need sleep and can't always get enough of it. Christmas is fast approaching and I need to finish shopping a bit. Not much but enough to annoy me about having to go out to Southridge again.

I'm trying to get some stuff done, and I'm just dropping this in here as I don't have the time to go on about things in detail.

There is one thing I need to get out and say though...

For Mister Dvorak - Yes "hotlinking an image is wrong". No if's, and's, or but's about it. Stop all the effing gyrations and just apologize to the guy. Institute a policy that your contributing editors have to credit images they use and get permisison. At the very least host the effing image on YOUR OWN DAMN SERVER. I'll say it here as others have said, you're very lucky the guy had the restraint to not change it to a rather nasty pornographic image. That would go over well with advertisers wouldn't it? Linking is not the same as 'Hotlinking', learn the difference. So stop getting your knickers in a twist and saying that the guy is trying to change the way the net works. Seriously. What a frickin' ego. I guess now I don't need at least one of my drafts. I'm not going to give it anymore thought.

Sorry, that's what you get for skimming through your newsreader before bedtime.

What's been going on?

2007-12-07T10:29:00.001-05:00

Just to update everyone... As usual, Erin has been sick, with a pretty nasty virus this time instead of an infection. This has pretty much been the status quo since she started pre-school. I can't even begin to say how many days she's missed and it's only a 2 day a week program. She's doing better now, but wow it's been a long week.

As for me, besides working at the PO, I've been working on clearing my HD of old program installs, downloaded freeware programs and various items that I want to archive as well as those I just needed to dump in the bit bucket. I've also been pulling down podcasts like crazy and burning them to CD for work so I've got something to listen to. A couple of shouts for WinginIt3D and SliceofSciFi. Just got into them recently and they're hilarious and lots of cool geek content. Probably NSWF a lot of times (especially WinginIt!), I don't think Slice is bad for anyone, they keep the language and topics fairly well reined in on that one.

Also I just found out about new exam apps being taken for the 931,932 and 933 USPS exams. That's the General Maintenance, ET, and MPE (Mail Processing Equipment) exams, respectively. They just put up the announcement and it's open for registration from Dec 1, 2007 to May 25, 2008. So it's like last time. A very long window to apply for the exam and probably about 3 weeks notice when it's given. I'm starting my study program again now, so I'll hopefully just be doing reviews by the time the actual exams come up (probably in Sept or August like last time.)

For this I've decided to follow the US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Course (NEETS). This is a nice set of PDFs that I pulled of a site, can't even remember it, but search for NEETS in Google and you'll find it soon enough. My version is the Nonresident Training course from Sept 1998. I figure it will be a good review for me and put me in the right mindset.

So that's mostly what's going on, and I'll probably not be doing a great deal of posting, certainly not anymore than what I'm doing right now (about 3-6 a month). I did have a pretty long draft of a post about File and Email encryption that I was working on, but I'm stalled on it while I try to figure out exactly what screenshots I want to use. I think that one will be split up between here and my MountainHomeTechInfo blog. I think the reasoning behind using it will be here, but the technical details of how will go there.

Picture organizing

2007-11-17T09:58:00.000-05:00

I was working the other day on organizing some digital photos and it struck me that I was going about it the wrong way. What I was trying to do was make smaller photos (rescaled) for the web/email/etc.. and I was trying to use Adobe Photoshop Album (Starter Edition 3). The reason behind that was it was free and we had been using it since version 2 to organize and keep track of our photos.

I'm not going to go into all the deficiencies of that program, but suffice it to say it wasn't working the way I wanted it to. I've been toying with Picasa and I like it for organizing and for adding photos to my google account, but resizing and doing all that stuff is a pain in it as well. So I went back to an old favorite and pulled down the newest version of Irfanview.

It's old school, but boy does it work. I'm using it to batch convert photos into email size images and rename them at the same time. This lets me make copies for email and keep them in a separate directory just for email shots, by month/year, and keep them available for sending out.

Sometimes all the bling is worthless if it doesn't do what you want it to do. Irfanview does great and I'll always keep a copy of it around.

Foreshadowing or just laziness?

2007-11-17T07:18:00.000-05:00

I don't usually have my digital with me when I go out as I only have the one(I hope to rectify that soon), but since I did, I had to grab this shot while at a red light. Wow.
That's gonna be one hell of a fill up isn't it?

Halloween 2007

2007-11-01T00:09:00.000-04:00

So it's over. It went pretty quickly actually. Again being where we are we got few trick-or-treaters coming by, more than last year, but then again it wasn't raining and was still light out.

Erin had a great time getting into her "Princess Aurora" (Sleeping Beauty for all those folks not hip the the new Disney Princess stuff) outfit. We started the night by a visit to MawMaw's house, and a walk around her block. Total of about 5 houses. Then back home for our neighborhood. She was ready to walk and go around and we hit one neighbor's house then the poor thing saw a kid in a Grim Reaper outfit and froze. Then she freaked out a bit calling for mommy and wanting to go home.

So that pretty much ended the night. She spent the rest of the evening dancing in the front yard and went to one other house later that evening. So I make that 7 houses this year. Better than none last year. I think now that she'll be good for next year. As long as no more grim reapers show up...

Fall color trip

2007-10-25T00:43:00.000-04:00

So, in what has become a yearly excursion for me, also a nice solitary trip, I went driving last Saturday (Oct. 20th). I didn't really have too many plans, just a desire to take some fall pictures again. I still don't have the actual film from last year's trip developed yet, and I now have 3 more rolls to send off.

The digital pics are up at my Flickr page. If you follow this link, go down about halfway until you see the sunrise pic from Hawks nest. I only put up some of the better shots. I'm trying to get a little better about editing my pictures and only passing on what I feel are the good ones. Editing seems to be one of the harder things to do, but it's a requirement.

Anyway, on to the trip. All was not well in the household as I got up. My plan was to get up around 5:30am and be out of the door by about 6. Didn't happen, although I still left not long after 6. Erin had gotten an ear infection (which we didn't know about at the time) and had not slept well. She was up around 4am and was up and down the rest of the morning. I did finally get up and finish packing up on time. I left about 6:15 or so and got my breakfast to go from the K.City McD's. Greasy and unsatisfying, but quick. Then off to Hawks' Nest for a quick stop. It was Bridge Day and I didn't want to get stuck in a lot of traffic. Fortunately, I was early enough to only have an occasional car or bike to deal with. Took a few shots, but as it was still early I wanted to get on the road.

The initial idea was to hang around Summersville lake and maybe go on to Carnifex Ferry SP. That went out the window pretty quick as I got closer to Summersville and realized what time it was. So then I figured out it wasn't really that far to Cranberry Glades. I had never been there and I decided to go, as well as wanting to drive down the Highland Scenic Highway, if the colors were good.

By the time I made it to Richwood I was sure it would be a good day. The colors were changing well and while traffic was a litter bit heavier than I would like it was still pretty light. My first real stop was at the Falls of Hills Creek Scenic Area on Rts. 39/55. I'd been by here, but never stopped before. You really should. It's a lot better I'm sure when there is more water in the creek, but there was still some. I mostly just walked the trail down to the upper overlook and back, taking a few shots here and there.

That's just a few of them. I spent a little time here and mapped out the rest of my day with my WV atlas. I decided to catch the Glades on the way back as Dad had told me the best way wold be to drive the Scenic Highway north to south. I'd come up to the southern end of it quickly from where I was. So back out onto 39/55 after a quick couple of pictures from the road out and on to Marlington. I hit 219 just south of Marlington and drove north until I came to the intersection of 150 (Highland Scenic Highway) and 219.

I had to keep waiting for the sun to come back out to take pictures while I sat there on the side of the road. I spent the next hour or so driving down the Scenic Highway and stopping periodically to take shots with both the film and digital cameras.

After all that I spent about an half-hour walking the boardwalk at Cranberry Glades and taking shots around that area. By this time I was getting really tired and ready to go home. I made it back to Summersville without stopping to take another shot. Lunch was another on the go meal and I made the mistake of heading back to RT 60 to come back to Charleston. I should have gone on up 19 to I-79 and home. Traffic from Hico to Montgomery was a nightmare. Lots of folks leaving Bridge Day early. Live and learn I guess. I ended up getting home about 3:45pm. Not a bad day, but since it began at 4am, it was just a little long

I've decided I really need to get a Digital SLR. I need to have something a little better than my Digi point and shoot, and while I enjoy taking the film shots and using my Nikon, I miss the immediacy of knowing just what I got in the picture.

There are more shots up at Flickr, and I'm going to upload all the shots I took to my Google albums, but that will be in a couple of days.

new links

2007-10-09T10:52:00.000-04:00

With the relaunch of the new WV Bloggers board, I've decided to actually take the time to do more than just skim over some of those listed, and I'm currently adding links as I get time and I find I read them on a regular basis. Please don't take it as a slight if you don't get linked from me.

I tend to not link to a lot of people, but I'm slowly changing my ideas on that. I don't expect anyone to link to me just because I'm a WV blogger unless they like my content. I'm not going to get annoyed or whatever if no one links to me so I don't expect others to get that way either. I'm not a person with a lot of free time on my hands so it takes me awhile to get around to doing things.

I've been online since before there was a web as we know it now, and I've seen a lot of stuff. Mostly to realize that it all comes around again, with just slight changes in technology.

AudioTape conversions

2007-10-05T02:19:00.000-04:00

As an aside to my last post, I'm in the initial stages of converting all my old cassette tapes that I don't already have CD copies of into digital files. "Format Shifting is a legal use!". Yeah, I know. Screaming about getting bent over by the industry and government won't help, but it's fun sometimes.

So I did find out that when I set up my receiver/tape deck/MD deck, I did manage to figure out the cabling to get the sound into my PC. It's not bad. I thought I'd have a horrendous hum on the line-in jack, but it's okay. As you might guess, I've been doing this under Linux with Audacity and EasyTag. I have made my decision to really try to do as little as possible under windows, and while it's sometimes a lengthy learning process, it's been a lot of fun doing that.

I'll do a post-mortem of my first tape conversion later, it took about 1 hour to do a 20 minute EP. That will come down significantly now that I know more of what I'm doing. I may post that up at MountainHomeTechInfo instead of here as it will be a bit technical.

If you're looking for a good beginning try hitting this article on Linux.com - "Digitizing Records and Tapes with Audacity". It's a good start, but I'd go ahead and do the manual labeling instead of relying on the silence finder, especially if you have eclectic music that has pauses in it. BTW, Audacity is MAC/Windows/Linux and EasyTag is Linux/Windows, so use your platform of choice, because choice is what free software is all about.

The Music Industry and it's own stupidity.

2007-10-04T09:38:00.000-04:00

Ok, let's start this on the basis that yes file-sharing is not right. It deprives artists of revenue for their work. Can we agree on that? OK. Some will, some won't. I see it just like an artist/photographer/singer etc. does. You pay a photographer for their print, but they get no say in how you hang it in your own home.

That said however, the idea that I can't copy tracks of of CDs that I purchased, or that I downloaded from Itunes, Emusic, etc... is ridiculous. The reason I mention this is that I ran across an article that mentions Sony BMG's head litigation person who said in response to a question about copying a song that an individual had purchased themselves...

"When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Making "a copy" of a purchased song is just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'," she said.

Now that's just patently stupid. I buy a CD and now in her mind I can't copy a track off that CD to put on my PC to listen to in my own home. I can't make a backup cd to take with me on the road so my original doesn't get scratched or stolen. So I can't make a copy to put on my portable audio player. If anything this just illustrates just how far removed from reality this litigator is. I purchased this music, I can do anything I want to with it except copy it and give it to someone else. I could also give my CD away or sell it as long as I don't keep a copy of it.

I don't agree with that kind of draconian pay-per play mentality. If you take this to it's logical conclusion, that's where it is going to end up. You'll have to pay them every time you want to listen to it. We've already had to pay again for updating our music when formats changed from LPs to Tape, and from Tape to CD. Now that we all can make our own copies of our music and change the format ourselves, is this the fear of the industry? That we will no longer have to pay them to rebuild our libraries of music everytime a new format comes out? That's an interesting question isn't it?

Fall

2007-10-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

So the lack of any relevant posting going on here could be assumed to mean that I'm busy or just tired of blogging. Both are somewhat correct, but the biggest thing is that it's now Fall and the new TV season has arrived. With Sci-Fi shows making up a large portion of the new season, I'm currently behind on my viewing. So instead of the normal - come home, get on the computer, it's come home, go watch an hour or 2 of taped shows.

Add to that fact that I've started watching B5 again, and all because of a damn podcast, and you'll understand that I'm spending way more time in front of the TV than the computer. As I pick and choose what ones to drop, I'll have more time to come back here and post a bit. Current ones that have already dropped are Moonlight, and Journeyman. I just can't get into them. I know they've just had one show each, but they didn't grab me enough to continue taping them.

You also have to take into account that I've become addicted to watching seasons of tv shows at once on the DVDs. No commercials, and I get to watch when I want to. This may be the main thing that keeps me from watching current shows. We bought season 3 of House M.D. a while back, and since we've only watched it on DVDs, we won't even bother watching season 4 on air. We'll just wait for August 2008 for it to come out on DVD.

Woot.

2007-09-29T16:46:00.000-04:00

The site. Not the exclamation. I've been paying attention to Woot for a while now. I have never bought anything from them, but I know a few people who have and have been pretty happy with all the stuff they have gotten. The other night I almost registered and bought something, but the price still held me off. I did figure out that it was a great price even though the Dyson was a refurb.

I've since registered and I'll probably get one of these the next time they come up. I've heard a lot of good things about the Dysons and we both want one for the house.

Okay I just had to...

2007-09-25T22:25:00.000-04:00

Saw this on my sister's blog and just had to take it.

It didn't tell me anything I didn't already know! Ha HA HA!

RIP - More passings of 2007

2007-09-17T07:33:00.000-04:00

I guess it started yesterday when my dad told me one of my high school teachers had passed away. Then today I saw that an author (Robert Jordan) whose books I'd read more than a few times had also died. I'm saddened by the passings of both.